


Not One of Blood

by RurouniHime



Series: Sarah-verse [1]
Category: Avengers (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Battle, Blood, Character Whomping, Child In Danger, Domestic, Established Relationship, Extremis, F/M, Future Fic, Injury, M/M, Marriage, Off-screen massacre, Post-Iron Man 3, Superfamily, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-26 04:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/961678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s just another Sunday, until it isn’t, and Tony’s own life becomes the very last thing he’s concerned about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony

**Author's Note:**

> Set about ten years after the events of Iron Man 3.
> 
> This fic is completely written, save for the very end of the last chapter, so I will be posting regularly until it's complete.

_Tony_

......

On Sunday morning, Steve goes for bagels.

“Let’s see.” He pats his pockets down with one hand. “Jacket, wallet, keys... Think I’m set.”

There is a lot of shrieking going on. Tony leans out of the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. “Might want to leave that here,” he says, nodding at Steve’s burden.

Steve whirls around, holding Sarah’s legs safely in place. “What, this? I don’t even know how I got this.”

“You picked me up!” Sarah cries from over his shoulder. Her face is ruddy in the cheeks, her smile wider than the sea. She kicks her legs futilely, and one atomic green slipper hits the wall with a thunk.

“No, I would have remembered that—” Steve turns his head and buzzes her side, and Sarah’s shrieking reaches a fever pitch. Tony raises his brows and sips his coffee. “Besides,” Steve says, “the bagel place doesn’t need any potatoes.”

“Sackapotatoes!” Sarah crows, and Steve buzzes her again.

“Here, give me that.” Tony sets his mug down and holds out his arms, gesturing with both hands. “I have to feed it or it gets cranky.”

Steve folds Sarah down off his shoulder in a smooth roll, cradling her on her back like a baby. He swoops in and gives her a long, noisy kiss on the neck. Sarah giggles and pushes his face away.

“One of these days, you’re going to figure out you like bagels,” Steve tells her. Sarah makes a gagging sound, complete with tongue hanging out of her mouth, and Steve passes her over. Tony promptly slings her up over his own shoulder and heads for the kitchen.

Sarah screams delightedly.

“Hey, you want lox?”

Tony turns, careful of the doorjamb, and Sarah drums her fingers against his back. “When have I ever not wanted lox?”

Steve gives him the eye. “Uh, that would be yesterday.”

“Locks?” Tony can practically hear Sarah’s nose squinch.

“Get me real salmon,” he says. “And sundried tomato. And garlic and green onions.”

Steve gives him a look of horror, then sighs and crosses the hall again. He takes Tony’s nape and cajoles him into a heavy kiss. Tony grunts appreciatively. 

“Ewwww.” Sarah’s moan is muffled against Tony’s shirt. Steve pulls away and pats Tony’s cheek. 

“For the dry spell after _that_ bagel.” He waggles his eyebrows and heads again for the elevator.

“Oh, you’ll be back for this,” Tony calls after him as the doors shut. 

Sarah grabs the back of his t-shirt. “What’s locks?”

“Lox. L-O-X. Pink stuff, made of squashed fish.”

She hums doubtfully, and he takes her into the kitchen, depositing her onto one of the stools by the counter.

“JARVIS, we got eggs?”

“A full dozen, sir.”

“Then give my girl the comics, will you?”

“The Post or the Daily?”

Tony throws up his hands. “What kind of hotel are we running here? Both. Throw in the Times cartoons.”

The countertop 3-D flares up, spinning a column of cartoon strips into the air in front of Sarah. She touches one and settles in on her elbows to read her way slowly through. Tony turns back to the stovetop, tapping it to life. He pulls a pan down from the wall and grabs the carton of eggs out of the fridge. To the right, toast pops up, smoking just a little. He slides it onto a plate for her and gives her the butter. For a few minutes, the only sounds are the tick of the range, the scrape of her knife, and the clatter of metal as Tony rifles through a drawer for more utensils. 

“Papa.”

“Daughter.”

“What’re you making?”

Tony cracks an egg in the pan and dumps the shell. “Protein. Necessary for future world rulers. You want anything in it?”

“Chocolate chips.”

“Chocolate chips and protein, that’s craziness, no child of mine is eating that. How about cheese? You like cheese. We’ve got the orange kind or the white kind, or the chunks of dried fruit in it kind.”

At his wave, she hops off her chair and shuffles to the refrigerator, and when he holds out his hand, she plops a bag of Nestle’s morsels into it. “The chocolate kind.”

“You are ridiculous, who eats chocolate chips with their protein?” He opens the bag and sprinkles a handful onto the eggs, where they immediately start melting. “You know what, I don’t think I know you. Do you live here?”

 _“Pa_ pa.” She rolls her eyes and crunches on a piece of toast.

“Seriously, I’m waiting for my daughter to get up for breakfast, she’ll be here any minute and you’re eating her toast—” He forks a lump of chocolate chip scrambled egg into his mouth. “—wow, this is really good, there’s a party in my mouth, this is just, this is disgusting, give me a napkin.”

“I am comfortable with my chocolate and protein,” she recites, nodding in time with every third word.

“Oh, I know exactly where that came from, JARVIS, edit that and send it to Her Royal Spyness. Set it as all of her ringtones, turn her volume up, and treat her to a continuous demo.”

“Sir, Agent Romanoff is in Tokyo, where it is currently almost midnight.”

Tony waits. “Yes?”

JARVIS’ sigh sounds careworn. “Calling now.”

A moment later, Tony’s phone beeps, but by then he has his hands full of protein-and-other-things. “You have a text message from Agent Romanoff, sir.”

“Read it out loud.”

“I do not recommend that course of action. Its content is inappropriate.”

Tony grins. “Here.” He sets down the plate and tosses Sarah a satsuma from the fruit bowl. “Have a fake orange.”

She gouges her thumbs in and takes the peel apart in a couple easy tugs. “Want a piece?”

“From you? Always. Ahhhh.” He bends over and opens his mouth, and she stuffs a wedge in. He fakes gnawing on her fingers and she snatches them away. “Hey, I was eating that.”

Sarah gives the ceiling an eye-roll that is a remarkable match to Bruce’s most long-suffering method of not turning into the Hulk around Tony. Tony leans on the counter next to her, resting on his elbows.

“So.” He steals her fork and takes another bite of her disgusting eggs. “Cartoons this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And then you want to go to Central Park?”

“Yes.”

“Want to go with your daddy to the Bureaucracy of Boring?”

“Yes. What’s that?”

“Where Phil works.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Want to tap dance for change in the subway?”

“Yes.”

“Gonna say yes to everything I say?”

“Yes.” She nods solemnly, drawing out the ‘s’ sound. Tony brushes her hair back from her forehead. It’s short and thick, the color of tilled earth on top and two shades darker underneath next to her nape. He twirls a curl around his finger and she smiles toothily at him.

“Better get this show on the road, then.”

She gets twenty minutes into her cartoon of choice, slumped so deep into the couch that just her ankles hang off the edge. Tony cleans up the kitchen, tosses a blue sparkly jacket and three socks onto her lap from the doorway of the den, then starts himself another pot of coffee and swings over the back of the couch with tablet in hand, tapping before his butt hits the cushion. She quietly lays a sock in his lap, and he quietly moves it back. She moves it again. He moves it back.

He’s getting up to fill his mug when his phone buzzes. He pulls it out of his pocket, turning hydraulic joints over in his mind, and in the next breath, every single alarm in the penthouse blares into tongue-biting life.

Tony spins, sees the shape outside the windows along the west wall right before the surge of white light. He drops the tablet and hauls Sarah over the back of the couch into one arm, lunging for the shelter of the hallway just as all the panes blow inward. Shards zing past and embed themselves in the back of the couch, the television screen, the opposite wall. Tony runs down the hall with Sarah in his arms, past the kitchen, and something explodes there, but he’s gone, he’s beyond it, the elevator mere yards away. “JARVIS! Is the lab intact?”

“Yes, sir. Panic room protocols initializing—”

The whole penthouse shudders, but the elevators doors slide open, smooth as ever. He grabs the edge, pulls them inside, and a mechanical _thing_ skids around the corner at the end of the hallway, metal arms flailing like a monstrous spider. It pushes into the air and shoots toward them.

Tony pulls Sarah to the side and the doors close just in time to bear the brunt of the pulse leveled at them.

It’s a quiet ride down two floors, save for Sarah’s rapid breathing. Until (so serious, like another, much lower voice he knows so well), “What’s happening?”

Tony turns her in his arms and studies her face. Her expression is very still, lips pinched like she’s clamping down on the insides of them with her teeth, and she’s not really looking at anything. He runs a hand over her hair, settling at her nape and giving her a gentle squeeze. “I don’t know, baby. Find out for you in a minute.” Then, to the elevator at large, “JARVIS, get the X-10 ready.”

“Working, sir. Preparation will take approximately seven minutes.”

“Activate Extremis protocols.” The doors open and Tony runs into the lab, hoisting Sarah onto his hip. The space has gone into lockdown, all the bulkheads falling into place, the elevator door clanging behind them like a steel trap. But he can feel the building shake.

“I must point out that the Extremis connection is untested in the Mark X-10. Extended use will likely cause extreme discomfort, perhaps lasting damage.”

“Like that’s new? Who are they?”

“The tower has been targeted by sixteen airborne drones of an unknown design. Thus far, their armament includes electromagnetic, incendiary, and projectile weaponry.”

“How’re we holding up?”

“The tower’s defenses will not withstand this barrage indefinitely.”

“Great.” He tucks Sarah close as the floor just overhead shudders. “JARVIS, get me Steve, now!”

An interminable moment later— “I’m sorry, sir, there is no response.”

“Where is he?”

“His mobile telephone places him on East 41st and Madison.” JARVIS’ voice checks, the slightest of breaks. “Where there is currently police activity in progress.”

Tony’s gut twinges in a low, horrible way. He puts Sarah down on the couch, crouches, and turns her face up at the chin. “Okay, stay right here, can you stay here?”

She nods. Her hands twist around each other, that agitation he recognizes so perfectly in himself. But she nods.

“Okay, cupcake. I’ll be right over there, I’m coming right back.”

“Are we going flying?” she asks in a small voice.

“Yes. Yes, we are. Two shakes, stay here.” He jumps up and runs for the terminal. The floor rocks, Tony skids, catches himself on the interactive panel. He snaps his head around, but Sarah has managed to stay on the couch, though she’s gone flat on her stomach. He gives her a smile and a thumbs up, then smacks a hand down on the terminal to wake it up. “Show me.” 

Police footage flicks on in high definition, East 41st and Madison, where people are running, sirens are blaring, and one man is standing his ground in the middle of the street, beset by six separate attackers. With skin and eyes glowing like embers. 

“Oh— _no.”_ He swipes the panel again and the footage zooms, a close up on Steve. He’s got scrapes up his cheek, like he’s already hit the ground once, and his shirt is ripped down the side. Tony glimpses something dark in the fabric, might be blood, and those are AIM soldiers, he’s well aware of what they can do to a man wearing a metal suit. Steve doesn't even have his shield. “JARVIS, get me the others—”

Window after window opens, strange angles of different footage: a spill of bright, horrific fire on the left, a cloud of rolling black smoke on the right. A jouncing handheld camera phone on a building coming down in pieces up top. The camera’s owner screams in a tinny voice, _“Oh my god! Oh my god!”_ In the footage on the right, someone rolls out of the smoke, scrambles upright coughing, and yanks a gun from his belt. It’s Clint, covered in soot, snapping shot after shot into the mess he’s just left. Machine gun fire rattles out in a shower of sparks and Clint ducks, turns and makes a mad dash out of view.

Somewhere in his brain, Tony places the explosions on the left (San Francisco, that’s the Presidio…), the destroyed street where Clint is still shooting (a hotel in… Newark?), and the building coming apart (Tokyo Tower there in the background). The Presidio explosion’s roar changes and Tony recognizes the sound right before the Hulk erupts from the fire into a rain of missiles. Helicopters, did they just—Was that a nuclear blast?

The tower rocks violently.

“Sir,” JARVIS says, “third level defenses compromised. At the current rate of fire, thirty-eight seconds until breach.”

“Suit’s up?” On the screen, one of the AIM soldiers kicks at Steve’s chest. Steve grabs his foot and spins to the side, yanks him close, breaks his leg at the knee, then hammers him away with a solid punch. The man flies backward into a car, and a woman, eyes burning, takes his place.

“Ready in twenty seconds, with your recent additions.” 

A male AIM soldier leaps high into the air, bringing the full of his weight down through his arms over Steve’s head. Steve looks up, sees it coming. He shoves the woman off him, braces. Raises his arm to block, and goes down hard under the blow.

“Steve!” It’s out before Tony can stop it. A third soldier wheels in, a fourth. Steve throws off one of them, but not the others. Not the others. They’re all on him at once, they’re—Steve rams his way free, staggers upright just in time for one of them to level a semiautomatic on him. He lunges into the soldier beside him and both of them jolt as the rounds hit.

A high pitched scream yanks Tony around. Sarah is standing there, eyes wide and horrified, fixed on the live feed. Her hands are white little fists in the front of her shirt. Tony jumps for her just as the ceiling overhead cracks right down the center. “JARVIS, now, do it now!”

The suit’s pieces snap over his arms one by one, forming around him where he kneels, zipping around Sarah where she stands. He releases her just long enough for the gauntlets to snick home, then grabs her up off the floor. She’s screaming, eyes scrunched closed, screaming and gasping and crying, and it’s just how Tony feels inside, Steve going down over and over and over in his brain. He can’t parse it, can’t let it coalesce, but it does anyway. 

His own cheeks are wet.

“Baby, baby, listen to me!” he shouts over the buckling of metal struts and the crashes of concrete. “JARVIS, open the east panels and blow the windows, Sarah, _look at me!”_

Her entire body gives a single wild wrack. The line of windows detonates right at that instant, and Tony hunches, turns her away as glass rains against the armor. Cold air rushes in, whipping Sarah’s hair up, and the opposite wall groans ominously. Half a minute at most. She’s breathing too hard, she’s hyperventilating, he has to— “Look at my eyes, _right now.”_

She—does. Shaking and gasping like a tiny rabbit, but she looks him in the eye. 

“You and me, right here,” he murmurs, stroking her head, wishing he could feel the strands of her hair through the gauntlet. “You listening?”

“They, they—” she chokes out.

“I know they did—”

“Daddy,” she sobs, and Tony feels another tear slide, but he fixes her face in place and holds her gaze.

 _“Hey._ I need you to hold on, everything you got, can you put your arms around my neck?” He grabs for the towel over the edge of the terminal and throws it around her shoulders. She still hasn’t moved. The final wall between them and oblivion begins to crumble. Outside, the whine of the drones soars, zeroing in on the opening JARVIS has created. The armor fuses shut around Tony and the modifications on his chest plate begin to warp outward, sliding in sinuous red and gold about Sarah’s hips.

Can’t think about Steve, can’t think about Steve right now or he’ll freeze.

“Papa,” she whimpers, and he can see her slipping again.

“You know I love you?”

She stills. Stares at him, their faces inches apart, the mask and the covering for her head the only parts of the suit not in place. After a second—somehow a quiet second, despite the cacophony—

“I love you more,” she says.

“No, I love you more.”

She shakes her head and tucks down tight, mushing her nose into his chest. “I love you most,” muffled.

Tony feels the watery grin burst free. The suit closes around her, and the mask snaps into place. “That’s my peaches, here we go.”

He blasts out through the ruined windows just as the far wall collapses. He slams right through the center of the closest drone and doesn’t look back to watch his tower fall.

** 

He keeps talking. 

He’s been talking for nearly an hour, just saying the first things that come into his head. Pointing out buildings and bridges and telling her about the architecture, tidbits he’s insanely grateful that his father pounded into his brain when he was young. The light is turning very nice, all glowy and gold, and in the distance, Philadelphia’s haze almost glimmers with it. He’s finding ways to appreciate it, damn it, because the other options will definitely send him into a tailspin. Even with the stealth plating, in this light, it’s touch and go remaining unseen when he’s flying _well._ He’s midsentence about One and Two Liberty Place when—

“Papa, I feel sick.” It pours out in a rush through the suit’s comm, the first words she’s spoken since he smashed their way out of the tower.

“Cupcake, you want to get out and walk a little?”

Her only answer is a whimper, and Tony takes a deep breath. “Okay, can you hold on just another minute?”

“Yeah.”

“JARVIS, hook in.”

The headache is immediate, a low drone at the base of his skull. The first thing Tony does is force himself to unclench his jaw. _We being followed?_ he asks.

_There are no technological signatures matching those of our attackers in the immediate vicinity, but my range is severely limited._

_Find me a landing spot. Suburbs, fewest warm bodies possible, but I need some kind of grocery store._ If Sarah’s not too sick to eat, Tony’s got to feed her something.

JARVIS backs out without answer, and Tony nearly gags with the relief of it as his mind empties of all the technological extras. The HUD’s grid lights up in red dots and clusters, the blue dots signaling grocery stores superimposed much more sporadically. Tony picks a backyard in a housing tract under construction on the edge of an established neighborhood. He makes the landing a little too fast, bumping and tripping, but as soon as he’s stable, he pushes back in with Extremis and takes the suit down, folding it into its tablet-esque shape.

The pain at the base of his skull lasts longer this time when he’s done.

A kid throwing up in the street is going to draw attention, and once anyone recognizes Tony, anyone at all, all bets are off. The best he can do is shove the tablet into the back of his waistband and tuck his shirt over it. He carries Sarah down a block, turns, and is greeted by the fluorescent lighting of the corner store JARVIS pointed them towards.

There’s no one inside save for the clerk, who is totally engrossed in the news footage of the smoking tower behind the counter. And thank god, because Tony has no shoes on his feet. He skirts Sarah down the back row next to all the refrigerated units. The bathroom is a one-room cube and clean enough; Sarah makes it in before she pales all at once and starts heaving.

Tony hangs onto her, smoothing her hair back from her forehead as she leans over the toilet. “It’s okay, Sarah-bear,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s okay.”

When she’s done, gulping repeatedly and too close to tears, he wipes her face and chin carefully with a damp paper towel and tucks sweaty hair back behind her ears.

“My shirt.” She sounds hoarse and miserable, plucking at the garment with her fingers. There’s a wet streak of vomit on the left side of her chest.

“That’s alright,” Tony says. There are no windows in here, just blank walls and a single small vent in the ceiling. He hesitates, then cranes around to the door. “I’ll get you a new one. You wanna stay right here, lock the door until I come get you?”

She doesn’t move, and he touches her eyebrow, the gentle slide of a fingertip along the length of it like Steve always does. Her lips purse, then part on a breath. In, out. She nods.

He rises to his feet. “You count to three hundred.”

He shuts the door between them and hates every second of it. His steps are jittery through the shop, to the corner near the front where all the memorabilia are. He passes the rack once, looking at postcards, before tugging the smallest sweatshirt off its hanger and balling it at his side. By the register, the TV’s still on, a commercial. Otherwise, the place is empty. The clerk aims his remote at the screen, flipping through channels and sipping a gigantic soda.

Tony moves back out of sight, snagging a bottle of Gatorade from one of the fridges as he passes. The floor is cold under his bare feet. It’s been about a minute and a half. He digs his cell from the pocket of his jeans and stares at its blank, black screen for a few seconds. All he wants is to get back in that bathroom, but... “JARVIS, how’s the street look?”

“Empty, sir,” JARVIS says in his earpiece.

He very nearly doesn’t ask. “And Steve?”

“No response to my attempts to contact Captain Rogers, at regular intervals as instructed. His mobile signal is no longer transmitting.”

No longer chipped? Or no longer intact? Tony considers trawling through the different feeds until any evidence of Steve’s situation presents itself. But that headache will be massive, and that’s not what Sarah needs from him right now. It’ll be hard enough to get the suit on by himself without JARVIS’ lab interface. He shuts his eyes, gets hold of himself, and opens them again. Makes a decision and puts the phone away. “JARVIS, call Pep, route it through the earbud.”

She picks up on the first ring. “T—Who is this?”

“Pep—”

 _“Tony._ Oh god, are you, are you okay? Is Sarah—”

“We’re good. Got out fine.” He finds himself twisting his wedding ring around his finger, just twisting and twisting. His skin starts to feel raw. “Are you safe?”

“I’m, yes, we’re at SI. We’re fine, nothing’s happened—”

“Pep,” he interrupts, hissing to keep his voice low. “Get Happy, get out of there. I don’t know who dropped in on the tower, but AIM got Steve in the middle of the fucking street, so you two need to _leave.”_

“Tony,” Pepper says, tone urgent, “this is bigger than AIM, they hit the Embassy in Tokyo and the SF conference at the same time as Vardo—”

“Wait, wait a second, what’s in— _shit.”_ Jane Foster’s in Vardo, with the kids. Or… or she was. Tony presses his fingers to his eyes. “Well, Thor’ll get to her, he’s,” —in Asgard, _damn_ it, he’s nowhere near Norway and there’s not a damn thing Tony can do about any of it except— “Pep, forget SI, you have to get out of town. They’ll come for you when they think about it and they’ll get in, just, you need to leave.”

“Where are you going?”

Tony worries his lip and squints up at the fluorescent lights. For a second, he nearly tells her. But something yanks at him, the secrecy of so many years, and most of all, the truth of Sarah behind that bathroom door, flesh and blood and fragile. _His._ Not super in any way, not yet, if ever. “Better you don’t know. But it’ll be safe.”

She hesitates for only a second. “Okay. Be careful, please be careful.”

“Always am.” He doesn’t give her time to express her disagreement, just ends the call and shuts his eyes. One more second to breathe, and then he’ll go and get Sarah, and they’ll—

Across the store, the television spits static, much louder than the volume warrants. Tony cranes his head around the end of the aisle to find the clerk covering one ear and hammering on the remote, glaring up at the TV as if it has personally wounded him. The overhead lights flicker and Tony stares at them for a fierce, sharp second, the first thready breath sucking tight to the back of his throat.

Sarah chooses that moment to crack open the bathroom door, and the windows up front explode inward.

“Sarah!” Tony lunges, but the drone outside blasts through the shop toward the movement, blowing the bathroom door right off its hinges. Sarah screams, and the drone fires again. Tony gets there first. Something hot snicks through his right side as he wraps himself around her. An instant later, his hand is incased in metal, the fire in the base of his skull sharpening his sight into a razor’s edge. He blasts a blue-white hole straight through the drone’s main canon. The pain of Extremis slashing into his brain whites out his vision for one careening second. He can feel the armor encasing his calves, thighs, biceps, hips. A second drone hums in behind the first, this one equipped with a gatling. Tony ducks away, and bullets rattle off his back plating as he yanks Sarah close and holds her head fast to his front.

The gun pauses—at fucking last—and Tony spins again on one knee as the chest plating snaps into place. His side protests, but the power-up ends in the concussion of release: the first drone slams backward into the second, sending both skidding down the sidewalk with a teeth-grinding shriek. Tony lurches to his feet and nearly goes down again from the pain beneath his ribs.

But the suit is nearly formed now. He sweeps Sarah up— “Tuck up, pumpkin,”—and fires the boot repulsors. A _third_ drone sideswipes him as he pummels through what’s left of the front window and Tony turns, scraping across it on his back. He digs in, bites through his tongue—forces the suit out and around Sarah with every shred of thought. The drone whirls, much faster than the others, and closes behind him, rattling energy pulses one after another into the suit. The repulsors buck and Tony’s flight tips sideways, almost down to the ground before he wills the boot thrusters on again. When the helmet finally snaps home, the HUD is all over the place, sparking and wavering. A fourth drone, and a fifth, swing in from the right. A sixth is coming straight for him.

“JARVIS, EMP, everything we got!”

It powers up with a whine even as JARVIS says, “Sir, this model’s abilities to withstand the blast are still untested—”

Tony punches it with a thought and the night sky around him shears white with the wave of static. The drones drop right out of the sky, and the HUD flickers out, leaving nothing but the darkness of the rooftops below him. 

Tony falls.

He tries to twist onto his back, get the compartment that encases Sarah above him. “JARVIS!” he yells, then, _JARVIS!_

He locks his thoughts onto anything he can find in all that vast sizzling blackness, and _wrenches._

The back-up system blinks on and the suit levels out with a flare of repulsor fire. Tony gasps, sees red, chokes on vomit as the pain spirals fiercely through his skull and down his spine. But they have altitude now, emptiness behind them, and—thank _god,_ just enough power to get them where he needs them to go. He turns the suit, dampens the repulsors’ light as much as he can. Flies as fast as the armor is still capable.

~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...because I saw IM3 and I NEEDED Tony-and-kid. Needed. You have no idea. This story began immediately after the film, like, in the parking lot. Just ask coffeejunkii.
> 
> Title taken from this quote by Richard Bach: "The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life."


	2. Natasha

_Natasha_

...........

Natasha is not, in fact, asleep when Sarah Rogers-Stark’s dulcet tones begin to recite on repeat in her ear. She pauses, the folder in her hand drifting toward the table, and then another familiar voice breaks through.

“My most sincere apologies, Agent Romanoff. I do this under protest.”

Natasha smirks and steps away from the group with a tip of her head, heading over to the far wall where a fire crackles merrily on the hearth. When she actually processes what Sarah’s saying, her smile bursts into a grin. She takes her cell out of her pocket and adjusts her earbud. “Good morning, JARVIS.”

“And a most pleasant evening to you, Natasha.” JARVIS lets the recording run once more, then shuts it off. 

“Always a pleasure to hear that my influence is overriding Stark’s.” She punches in a text that ought to make Tony’s eyes sting and sends it along, unable to dampen the smirk again as she imagines Tony sputtering in his penthouse kitchen.

JARVIS hesitates. “I would say the meeting of your influence and that of Mr. Stark’s could be a most volatile combination.”

She can’t argue with that. And she’s absolutely forwarding this along to Clint’s phone, right now. 

_You can go lick your wounds now,_ she types. _Love, decidedly, the favorite aunt._

She hits send, and the service fails. Natasha frowns, opens up the text draft and tries again. This time it pops on through and she makes a mental note to toss the model at Tony’s head once she’s back in the states. “Coverage everywhere on the planet and some asteroids, my ass.”

She heads back to the ornate mahogany center table, where the liaison to the Japanese government and his administrators are waiting. It’s late already, and they still have a lot to cover.

When she takes out her phone again almost a half hour later to see if she’s got a return message from Clint, her unsent text is again staring her in the face. Natasha hits send with a firm jab, and watches as it ricochets right back. She hits send again, and this time it bullies its way through. She touches her earbud. “JARVIS, is something wrong with my phone?”

No answer. Natasha waits for a few seconds. “JARVIS?”

The murmuring goes on behind her, now lighter in tone, people stretching and getting refreshments on their self-imposed break. Natasha retreats back toward the hearth and relative privacy, and opens up her phone’s systems.

She’s getting a full five bars, no intermittency. And yet—She taps back, pulls up the SHIELD debug program she had IT install.

“That’s not right.” Natasha may not be the computer genius that _some_ people are, but she makes it a point to know how all of her tools and toys run, and what they look like when they’re out of sync.

Her cell is definitely out of sync. It’s not the debug itself, but rather something that’s interfering with the input-output signal for the last action the device tried to complete. She uses the program to trace back, find out if the text to Tony went through. It very nearly didn’t, slipping around the anomaly on one of its repeat cycles and pinging away into the ether. 

Natasha’s fingers move without conscious thought, just… a hunch. She opens up the internet. No block on that at all. But as soon as she calls up Clint’s contact number again, the bars on her phone shiver and drop. And right then, something dings, a warning straight from the debug. The message that springs up, however, is garbled, and the coverage disappears again.

“JARVIS, are you reading me at all?” she mutters.

Again no answer. It’s almost as if she’s being jammed.

Or he is.

“Shit—” She jabs the screen away and activates SHIELD’s emergency satellite signal. The bars on her phone shoot straight to five, a beautiful glowing green. Natasha hits speed dial 1, the all-call-out, and an ear-shattering _boom_ knocks her off her feet.

She can’t hear. Nothing more than a high-pitched whine. She pushes up from the floor where she’s landed, blinking and dizzy, shoulders smarting fiercely, to find smoke and dust and silence. The room’s far wall is down, nothing but the night beyond, and—there are people on the floor around her, their faces filthy, bloody, twisted in various states of shock. Mouths moving but she _can’t hear them._

It takes quite a bit of work to get to her feet and when she looks down at the blocky thing clutched in her hand, she finds her phone still calling out. She starts, remembering, and presses it to her ear. There’s nothing to hear there either, but the screen shows the line ringing and ringing, all of the team’s phones unanswered.

 _“Shit.”_ She knows she says it. Still can’t hear it. She claws her way through rubble, pushing aside a chair that falls apart at her touch. Someone’s pinned under the table at the waist, but is moving enough that she doesn’t think there’s serious injury. She grabs the edge, ears humming, and heaves it off, right as a man in black swings in on a line through the smoke.

She’s lunging even as he aims his weapon, and the sound of the round thumps, muted against her eardrums. She rolls, yanks her dress up and wrenches the gun from her thigh holster, then delivers two shots to the head from the floor. The assassin drops silently, but Natasha’s already moving, on her feet and scrambling for the exit because there’s no way the man was alone. Sure enough, another round goes off behind her, spraying plaster off the wall a foot in front of her face. She skids, dives the other way, and pulls herself back behind the table as two more bullets thud into its surface.

Natasha yanks out her ankle gun as well, lets out a breath, and wheels up onto her knees, weapons aimed over the edge of the table.

Three figures, automatics, goggles—She picks off two before anything else registers, but the second only jerks around from the shoulder wound and Natasha shoots again. Misses. The third assassin, and now a fourth, zero in on her and she ducks.

Door’s too far away, but their rappelling lines hang free, swaying in the air currents outside the busted wall. Four floors up, fall lethal, rope’ll do—She fires again, another headshot, dives around the table and rams her shoulder straight into the belly of the nearest attacker. The woman goes down in a heap, gets hands on Natasha, and Natasha turns, breaks an arm, tugs the woman in front of her just in time to shield against another hail of bullets.

Flash grenade at the woman’s hip. The assassin’s weight sags in her arms and Natasha grabs the grenade, pulls the pin. Sends it tumbling along the floor. It ignites with a bang. Natasha pitches her dead attacker off of her and leaps for the opening, hands stretched out for a rope.

She makes it, and slides down an entire two floors, ripping her palms to hell before she can get a leg around the line. The jolt when she stops snaps her deadened fingers off the rope and she hangs upside down, the line digging into her thigh and calf. For too long a moment, all she is aware of is the drone of tinnitus in her ears and the lopsided city, the strange rocking of the buildings as she sways back and forth.

She forces herself up, abdominal muscles aching, and grabs onto the line again despite the pain. Hugging it to her body with her forearms, she rappels down with her feet, eyes on the swiftly approaching street. When she hits, she staggers but stays upright, and heads for the nearest dark space she can see, which turns out to be a narrow walkway between two sections of the embassy. No lights, no one there.

Above her, explosions rattle the building and smoke drifts from the gaping hole in the wall like steam. Footsteps sound on pavement, a lot of them. Natasha crouches against the wall, glad of her black clothing, hunching to hide all the pale skin of her shoulders. She waits till they pass, then opens up the inner workings of her phone again. 

It’s a good bet they’re able to trace her, whoever they are. And no one from the team has called her back. It’s not something she can afford to ponder at the moment. She creeps along the wall, deeper into the darkness, and eventually squeezes through the end of the passageway, spilling out onto another street. Her hands are stiffening up as she shuts her phone down and puts it away, fingers tight as claws and palms absolutely burning from the rope fibers. The top of her dress has some decorative ruffles she definitely doesn’t need, and she rips them off to wrap around her hands. Her cheek feels scraped and her knee is not moving the way she’d like it to. But it is holding her weight, for now.

Shouting echoes in Japanese, and then the snap-snap of a weapon equipped with a silencer. Natasha whirls, heart thumping up into her throat, but the street is still empty. The sound must have echoed through the passageway she just left. Still, she knows black ops when she sees and hears it. Time to get out of range. Turn the phone back on when it’s safe and find out what the hell is going on back home.

~tbc~


	3. Clint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Quick note here: This fic will not, and was never going to, deal with any avenging on the part of our favorite supers.** It has come to my attention that people may be expecting a neatly tied up ending. This fic isn't going to go that far, because, let's face it, that would be pretty far. I always intended this story to tackle the immediacy of such a scenario as this, and thus it will not follow the entire conflict to its final conclusion. But I do promise closure of another sort. ^_^ I hope this doesn't put anyone off.

_Clint_

..........................

Rolling his sleeves to his elbows is sufficient to conceal the bloodstains on Clint’s cuffs. Everything else will just have to be passed off as a not-so-particular hygiene regimen. It’s good enough for government work. Clint snags a pair of glasses off the display rack facing the entrance to Target and grabs himself a baseball cap an aisle later. The cameras have already picked him up, but he’s no stranger to making himself inconspicuous. He takes the back way through the kids’ clothing section and then on through shoes to the aisle with all the first aid equipment.

Bandages, lots of them. Isopropyl alcohol, painkillers, burn spray. A side trip through housewares for a set of needles and some floral print towels. Over to camping gear for a lighter and a Maglight.

He pauses in electronics, poking through iPod earbuds long enough to get a good look at each of the TVs. They’re all tuned to different news stations, and everyone at the registers is pretty much openly fixated. There’s a woman reporting at a fast clip outside the destroyed embassy in Tokyo, another from the only news copter willing to get close enough to the mess on the west coast. Clint can see the smoke, hear familiar roars that are frankly way too close for any reporter’s peace of mind, in his humble opinion. Another television is rebroadcasting the police footage of the fight on the streets of New York, and Clint has to make an effort to keep his face expressionless as he watches Steve get blindsided and pummeled, before the police themselves start taking the brunt of AIM’s attack and everything goes staticky. The Baxter building is a mess, scorch marks that have nothing to do with the initial attack lacing the skeletal frame up top. Looks like at least one of the Four was still at home.

Then there’s the tower.

Everything from the labs up lies shattered on the ground: penthouse, living quarters, the upper level gym. Smoke still pumps out of the top like a factory smokestack, and the base is surrounded by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Clint checks out at one of the registers, and the employee barely glances at him, running his purchases over the scanner and sticking them into a plastic bag without looking, except to count the cash he hands her.

There’s nothing new to learn here, but he stays for an extra moment after she’s done, watching with the rest of them and picking at a fingernail with his thumb.

It’s when he’s turning away at last that one of the reports switches over, and Clint stops dead. 

It’s shitty CCTV footage of Stark, barefoot in a wrecked convenience store, blasting the hell out of a monstrous drone that is bashing its way through the front facade. Clint watches the entire clip until it starts to cycle, then gets himself out of there as fast as he can.

Phil is waiting where he left him, leaning nonchalantly against the wall just inside the alleyway. But Clint can see the faint shiver to his frame. It’s getting dark enough that Phil’s pallor won’t be as visible to others, but Clint needs light and an enclosed space to work.

“Put your arm around me,” he says, helping Phil upright. Phil moves off the wall with only the softest of grunts and Clint gets an arm around his waist. He checks Phil’s shoulder again, and then his side. The shoulder is just a graze, though it’s bleeding freely enough. The side is more serious, and it’s soaking through the remains of Clint’s sweater.

“I’m okay,” Phil murmurs, as if he knows exactly in what way Clint needs the reassurance. Clint shares a smile with him in the gloom.

“Stark’s alive,” he says, conversational as they move down the street, keeping to the more shadowy areas with less traffic. Phil’s stumbling is exaggerated now, and Clint adds a sloppy swing to his own step: with any luck, people will just think they’re drunk. “Or he was an hour ago. Got shot at in a convenience store and blew his way out.”

Phil nods. He has a goofy grin plastered to his face but his question comes out low and serious. “You see Steve?”

“Nothing new.”

Phil grunts. “He’ll go to ground. Ditch everything he doesn’t absolutely need.”

“He might not be alive, Phil.” And if AIM—Clint clenches his jaw—if AIM helped itself to their friend’s body in all the chaos, the NYPD would never know.

To his credit, Phil manages a shrug. “Not much we can do about it from here, either way.”

Clint gets them a few more steps, then takes a breath. “I’m pretty sure Tony had Sarah with him.”

Phil turns to stare, the only sign of loss of composure. “She was there?”

“Not a hundred percent certain, but I think I saw her. Behind him.”

“Where was he?”

“Philly.”

Phil is quiet for a long moment. “I know where he’s going.”

Clint’s phone buzzes sharply in his pocket. He drags it out, checks the screen and allows himself a second to keep from collapsing in relief. He presses the phone to his ear, hitching Phil carefully higher in his grip. “Yeah.”

“A minute before they lock onto us,” Natasha says.

Clint notes the time on his watch. “How?” There are systems in place, both SHIELD- and Stark-made.

“Don’t know. But our friend called someone in that store. You see the footage?”

“Shit.” Clint thumbs to their right, a hotel with a blinking vacancy sign, and Phil shakes his head. But Clint’s already with him: a little too much of a limelight, and he can’t assume access to either of their credit cards, even if it’s clear their attackers weren’t expecting Phil. 

If Tony, Steve, Natasha, and Bruce were targeted at the same time by so many different factions of whoever this is, then SHIELD was likely attacked as well. Unsecured channels, then. “You clear?” he demands.

“I have some very interested parties on my tail,” she grouses.

“It’s a little red over here,” Clint says, and knows his tone is enough to convey Phil’s status because Natasha curses.

“Bad?”

“No,” Phil mutters. Clint turns them down a street toward more neglected looking structures. Warehouses, maybe. Whatever, they look unused.

“S’not good,” he says. “How’s the road looking?”

“Too much traffic.” 

Which means she has no viable means of getting back to the States. Clint swears and checks his watch again. Thirty seconds.

“I’m gonna sleep,” he says, “treat this headache.” Lie low and fix Phil. “Then meet up with the sibs for shawarma.” Find the rest of the team. If they can.

“Sibs available?” she asks, and he can’t help the pause.

“I don’t know.”

“We need a new line,” Natasha says, and Clint assents. If he finds Tony—hell, when Tony next has a free moment, the first thing he’ll do is figure out a safe way to communicate. Assuming Tony’s still alive. And that is not a box Clint wants to open, not with that glimpse of Sarah cowering in black and white security footage.

“Pretty scattered.” He’s having a tough time coming up with good code. “You picked a hell of a time to go east.”

“I know.” She draws an audible breath. “How many party crashers at your place?”

“Three.”

“That’s all?”

Clint pulls Phil more tightly against him, and winces at the muffled groan. “They weren’t expecting an actual party.”

She’s quiet for a second. “I stand corrected. Stay in that closet.”

Clint smiles, weary, and doesn’t tell her that he’d been starting to come around to her way of thinking, until this very morning. He’s not in the sexuality closet so much as he’s in the public knowledge closet. The team knows Clint doesn’t ride solo, and he and Phil know. Phil’s parents know, here in Jersey, because that was the whole point of this trip. Fury knows, and Sitwell. As far as Clint and Phil are concerned, that’s everyone who matters. 

And that lack of intel on their attackers’ part is probably the only reason he and Phil are still alive at this very moment. If Phil hadn’t gotten out of bed this morning when he did—

“Discuss it later. You set for now?”

Natasha pauses. “I have someone I can call. I just—Shit.”

The line goes dead. Clint checks his watch and swears again. Turns off the phone completely, and shoves it into his pocket. He wraps his other arm around Phil just as Phil sags alarmingly, and urges him toward the warehouses.

It’s simple work to break the rusty padlock on the door, but to Clint’s mind, that’s just another unsecured way in behind them. Still, he heads into the recesses of the building, glad of the abandoned equipment sitting around under tarps. The space is sectioned off by accident: piles of machinery block the sightlines to the broken windows, and a listing metal partition is half pulled across the middle of the room, hanging off its roller. To the left, stacks of crates sit collecting dust. The farthest bunch rest against the wall, only one or two high.

Clint helps Phil onto the lowest crate, easing him down until he’s sitting. His eyes are on Phil’s hand, braced against the edge, and its utter whiteness freezes Clint where he leans, still bent over with an arm around Phil’s torso. He jerks up, stares Phil in the face.

Phil’s not even hiding the pain anymore.

Clint comes around in front of him, kneels and grips Phil’s knees, one hand each. “Tell me.”

Phil’s head bobs a little but his gaze remains steady. He slides a hand over his side, lumpy with the makeshift bandage. Clint tugs Phil’s shirt up and finds much more blood than expected.

 _“Phil—”_ He tries to get Phil down onto his back, supine atop the length of the crate, but Phil stops him.

“Upright.” He’s breathing deep but still too fast. “Or gravity’s working against us.”

Clint grabs the bag of first aid supplies and lays it all out next to Phil’s thigh as Phil gets himself out of the jacket. He rips his shirt far enough up the seam to tuck it out of the way. By the time Clint has everything sterilized and the Maglight in his teeth, Phil’s back to clutching the crate’s edge, hunched over and huffing shakily through his nose.

The wound—a fucking knife, of all things—has a neat entry point. Its twin in Phil’s back has clotted over, but it’s flimsy; one good bump will set it flowing again. Clint sprays the front incision with numbing astringent and cleans it briskly, then sets about closing it up with quick stitches. But by the time he’s finished, the back wound is leeching again and Phil’s face is quickly going ashen. Clint throws caution out the door and rubs away the rest of the clot, lets the blood flow bright red before pinching the hole together and stitching it shut. 

It’s too rudimentary to not leave scars, and Clint’s no artist. But it’ll do. He sprays Phil’s side again, wider sweeps that have Phil murmuring a little too dully for Clint’s comfort. He rattles out four pills into his palm, pauses, then puts one back. He hands them to Phil along with a bottle of water, and Phil takes them without preamble.

Clint bags everything up, gets his gun out of his boot and then Phil’s, and straightens. “Here, hold still,” he warns, and eases carefully around Phil onto the crate. He settles against the wall, legs spread either side of Phil’s hips, and pulls Phil gently back into their cradle until Phil rests against his chest. Clint sets one gun to his right and one to his left, within easy reach. He’s got a line of sight to the door, as well as enough cover to let them find more quickly, should anyone come through. That dealt with, Clint lays his fingers against Phil’s forehead and begins a slow massage.

“Not a good time to sleep,” Phil mumbles. By drugs or by injury, he’s already halfway there, and Clint wants him all the way, for as long as they can get away with it.

“Take a page out of my book,” Clint says, his lips to Phil’s ear. Phil’s head tilts against the side of Clint’s face, and Clint feels him breathe in and out, long and steady.

**

When Phil wakes up, he says, “Those were Department X assassins,” as if he’s stating how he takes his coffee.

“What?” Clint wipes his face and struggles a little more upright, careful of Phil’s weight against his chest. Still, he can feel Phil tensing, and he slides his hands lower, bracing, giving more support as he shifts them.

It’s light again, early dawn spilling through dirty windows. There’s no undue heat coming from Phil, which is a damn fine thing. He’ll have to unwrap Phil’s wound, check it later, but it’s still too early for those clots to be hustled around.

“Department X,” Phil repeats when they’ve settled. His voice is strained around the edges. 

“Soviet Union’s gone,” Clint murmurs, but Phil’s right and they both know it. That kind of stealth and those types of weapons come out of a very specific training program. He’s willing to bet that’s who came after Natasha, too, though there’s no way to confirm. He does know they’d only pit the best against her, and she’s all alone out there.

The fact is, Clint’s only alive right this second because Phil was there in the room of their hotel, and their attackers, whoever they were, didn’t know that. Weren’t expecting two people capable of defending themselves against trained hitmen. 

He breathes in, lets it out. Breathes in again and lets it out. “AIM soldiers for Steve,” he muses, and doesn’t go farther along that line of thought. Just facts for now; he’ll deal with the rest later.

“How many?”

“Six. Maybe more.”

“Six.” Phil exhales it on a sigh, and Clint waits. “That wasn’t AIM at the tower.”

Clint snorts his dismissal. AIM doesn’t have the tech to go up against the Iron Man suit, but there are others who do, and the only saving grace has been that they’ve never joined forces with the more biological set of ne’er-do-wells. Until now. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I need to get to SHIELD.”

But it’s a hollow sentence, the edges of it dipping into a vast chasm. Within minutes of each other, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Newark were hit. The tower was hit. Steve was hit. There is absolutely no reason to believe that SHIELD escaped unscathed, and Clint can think of more than a few organizations that could successfully bring down a SHIELD facility, if that facility were somehow caught unawares.

It’s a chilling plan of attack. Department X for him, Phil, and Tasha. The heaviest of artillery for the Hulk, and high powered tech for Tony. AIM’s soldiers can match Steve in hand to hand. They heal faster, and though Steve is better than any one of them when he’s armed, they chose the moment he didn’t have a weapon on him. But… “How the hell did they know Steve was going out?”

Phil hums, but Clint doesn’t need him to speak to understand what he’s sifting into place: Whoever blasted the tower attacked Tony in his home base, surrounded by all his most deadly weapons, counting on sheer power to overwhelm. They didn’t care about separating him from his armor. Maybe Steve wasn’t meant to be attacked in the street at all. Maybe Steve was supposed to be there in the tower when it went down.

It gnaws viciously at Clint’s guts. That’s their home, where they live their lives, where Tony and Steve raise their daughter. Attacking Iron Man and Captain America is one thing, hell, attacking Clint and Phil is _one_ thing. But Sarah—

“Fuckers are dead,” Clint growls. “I’m killing them. FYI, Phil.”

“Take a number,” Phil says pleasantly.

“Said you knew where Tony’s headed?”

Phil nods. “I do.” And nothing more. Clint doesn’t press. If it was told to Phil and not the rest of the team, then it was told in confidence, probably by Tony _and_ Steve. Clint can’t blame them: he’s willing to bet there’s a safe house squirreled away, for a damn good reason who sometimes wears her hair in little buns with happy face barrettes.

Tony’s taking their daughter there, and he’s doing it without going after Steve first, which is absolutely contrary to the person, the partner, that Tony Stark is. There’s a terrible, sobering method to this, a rock bottom contingency plan.

Clint pictures himself under fire, with no clue whether or not Phil is alive, and feels sick.

“You tossed your phone?” Phil asks. At that moment, his voice is especially welcome and Clint shakes his head a little too fervently.

“No. In case we can use the parts. But it’s a compromised line. Yours is probably good for a minute.” He stops and stares at Phil. “Or more. Phil. Are you hooked into the team alert line?”

“I get the alerts, yes.” Phil frowns, but Clint’s got a notion and it’s making more sense the brighter it blooms.

“Like Fury does. Like Hill does. But that’s all, Phil, _they didn’t know about you.”_

“If they hit SHIELD,” Phil starts in immediately, “they wouldn’t need to trace the director’s phone specifically, or any particular agents.”

“They didn’t know you were with me, and we didn’t leave any of them alive to tell secrets.” He’s trying to think, to remember if Phil made it onto any of the footage that the newsrooms were blaring.

“Alright.” Phil nods. He holds up his phone, turned off. “But we’re not using it until I’m sure we’re somewhere that it’ll do some good.”

**

It’s a long walk to the fallback at St. Mary’s Cemetery, on the other side of Elizabeth. But Phil takes it step for step, and though they go slowly, there’s a doggedness to their pace that heartens Clint. 

It is, however, a lot of time to think. 

He has to trust that Natasha will take care of herself, that Tony will weather this like he’s weathered every other thing that’s ever happened to him, that Steve survived and, as Phil said, went to ground. That Bruce is indeed as invincible as he claims. It’s a lot of faith to place all at once, especially now.

They stop for some rest in a golf course, breaking into a little shed to wait out the heat of midday. It’s muggy and irritable weather, and Phil is sweating profusely by the time he stretches out on the floor and shuts his eyes. Clint checks his wound and finds it still in good order. He douses it with another round of lidocaine spray, changes the bandage, and finally slumps down to get some sleep.

Turns out he can’t. His mind will not stop skipping from face to face. He can’t help feeling envious of Phil, who drops off quickly, flat on his back in a suit jacket that still manages to look nice, despite all the dirt collecting in its threads. Clint’s too restless to sit near Phil, too against waking him up if he’s able to find even a scrap of rest. He sits up against the wall on the opposite side of the shed and fiddles with his cell. He’s careful to keep it locked out of server access, but there’s a recently downloaded file that catches his eye. Clint pulls it up, wary of some kind of bug, or warning. 

It’s an audio file, sent from Natasha’s phone sometime yesterday morning. Automatic download, or maybe he hit it in his sleep, thinking the buzzing was his alarm. At any rate, there it is, waiting to be played. He scrolls and finds a message: 

_You can go lick your wounds now. Love, decidedly, the favorite aunt._

Clint hits enter.

 _“I am comfortable with my chocolate and protein,”_ says a tiny, indignant voice into the silence of the shed. _“I am comfortable with my chocolate and protein. I am comfortable with my chocolate and protein.”_ The ‘I’ drawn out, the ‘protein’ turned down at the end in satisfaction. The very tail end has the beginning of laughter Clint knows well: Tony Stark on that first intake of breath before he barks out an appreciative cackle. The message repeats again, Sarah stating her mantra with the same lilted tone. The cell shakes and Clint realizes abruptly that he’s the one trembling.

He hikes back a sob, but it tears out anyway, a pathetic sound that hitches his shoulders painfully against the rough wooden wall behind him. Once he’s started, he can’t seem to stop. It pulses up out of him like bile, until he can’t muffle any of it, and he’s just riding it until it tires of him.

He becomes aware of Phil when Phil touches his shoulders, but… he still can’t stop. Natasha’s message flashes before his eyes and he curls forward, certain that she’s dead, it’s the last thing he’ll ever hear from her, and the last time he’ll ever hear Sarah at all.

“What? What is it?” Phil grips his shoulders, and Clint shakes his head, rocking a little. Phil takes his phone from him. Clint can’t hear the recording over the noise he’s making, but he knows it’s still playing. Finally Phil eases down beside him and pulls him into his arms. He doesn’t say a word, just shuts the audio off and rubs Clint’s arms slowly and steadily.

He feels warmer than he did.

Clint doesn’t say anything about Sarah, or Tasha. Or the rest. There’s no point, when he knows Phil won’t give him any false assurances in return. There’s no way to know what’s happened to any of them at this point. But Phil… Phil is feverish, Phil is hurt, Clint should be able to do something about that, but he can’t, and that, Clint cannot handle at this moment.

“Hey. _Hey._ I’m fine.” Phil’s voice hushes over his ear, pressed close enough that Clint can feel his lips moving. He didn’t realize he was saying it all out loud. 

“I’m running a little hot,” Phil goes on, “but I’m not delirious, I’m moving on my own, I’m not bleeding anymore. I’m good. We’re good.”

“We’re the only ones,” Clint chokes out, and Phil squeezes him tighter. 

“We don’t know that,” is all he says.

It’s far from the all-knowing banishment of evil that is needed for this situation, but for some reason, it works better. Clint feels the sobs easing, draining slowly out of him. The fear recedes to something manageable, and he swallows the rest of it down with only a little more effort than usual.

He lifts his head and pulls back, trying to see Phil’s face. “You’re sick,” he whispers. His throat hurts. 

Phil nods solemnly but doesn’t lose Clint’s gaze. Clint touches his chin, slides his fingers down until he can feel the pulse beating steadily at Phil’s carotid. “I need to get you some medicine. Now.”

Phil doesn’t argue. He doesn’t pull Clint up—Clint wouldn’t want him to waste his strength anyway—but he does steady Clint as he rises to his feet, pushing against the wall for balance. Clint cracks the door and looks outside. Some time has passed, the sun lower in the sky and the air not quite so sultry. Down the hill, a golf cart rolls by, carrying two chattering women.

Clint grabs Phil’s hand and leads him out, something firm and familiar thudding down into his belly when Phil interlaces their fingers.

They manage another pharmacy, and though there’s no way they’re getting hold of antibiotics, Clint grabs the best fever reducer he can find, and a lot of bottled water. It’s easy enough to locate the magnetic strips on the bottles and peel them off. He doesn’t have enough money left to pay for this. Phil makes no objection, just takes his pills and drinks the water, then tilts his head down the road toward St. Mary’s.

It’s dark again by the time they reach the gates, already well-padlocked for the night. Clint heaves himself over and finds a wheelbarrow on the other side, upturned by the caretaker’s shed. On his side, Phil pulls himself up using one of the granite columns that support the wrought iron, and drops atop the barrow with little more than a grunt to show his exertion. Clint helps him out, and they both look around.

“There.” Phil points at something Clint can’t really distinguish in the gloom, but he knows where they’re headed. One of the crypts in the oldest part of the cemetery, where everything is covered in ivy and the names have worn thin on the headstones, is not full of decomposing remains as much as medical supplies, computer equipment, and an access tunnel. Clint’s never had to use it before, but its location has been stamped into his mind from the moment he relocated to the field office in NYC.

The back of the cemetery is not visible from the gates, or any of the fence line. Not a lot of people come here; many of the stones are tilted at strange angles, and the plots themselves are long since flat, most of them sunken in. Clint spots the crypt they’re looking for first, the figure in the shadows of the ancient oak beside it second. He jerks, pushes Phil behind him.

Maria Hill steps out of the darkness, empty hands raised, and Clint slumps hard. 

“Fuck. You owe me a year of my life, Hill.”

She comes closer immediately, assessing the situation and taking Phil’s other arm. “How bad?”

“Knife, in the front and out the back. Missed his internal organs, and I sewed it up tight, but he’s feverish.”

“I’ll do for now,” Phil mutters, as if he’s talking to children.

“You’re in luck.” Hill helps Clint and Phil over the pocked grass to the entrance of the crypt, a lonely granite façade that doesn’t look as if it could house a proper tomb, never mind an array of emergency tech. “I happen to have the good drugs.”

“I’m more concerned about who you have,” Phil pants. He’s not relying completely on them to stay up, but it’s a close thing. Clint realizes just how near to dropping Phil really is. Hill hums and pushes the door open. Across the space, concealed from immediate sight by a tumbled stone casket lid, a staircase heads down into the floor, faint but warm light shining out of it. Clint goes first, bracing Phil against his back, and Hill follows, pulling the trapdoor into place behind them.

Well underground, the stairway opens up into a room about the size of Clint’s quarters back at the tower. Its stone walls, ceiling and floor are functional and unornamented, and the place is filled with the hum of electronics. At one of the consoles, Melinda May wheels around in her chair, eyeing them both.

“Oh, good, it’s you. Nick?”

Out of some back enclosure, Nick Fury appears, out of his coat and looking just like the rest of his agents in nondescript black. He looks to have escaped serious injury, though Melinda’s pant leg has been ripped off mid-thigh, and a thick white bandage wraps the length of her leg to just below her knee. She raises her eyebrows at them.

“Agent May,” Phil says formally. Clint nods to her, then looks to Fury, and around him.

“We’re it?”

“So far,” Fury answers. “May dragged herself here about an hour ago—”

“Strode,” Melinda intones, her eyes back on the screen before her. “I strode myself here.”

“With a stiletto through her thigh,” Fury continues with only the briefest pause. Melinda doesn’t argue. She hooks her good foot around the rolling chair beside her and kicks it in Fury’s direction. Fury catches it and wheels it to Phil so Clint can let him down into it. Hill comes back from a row of refrigerated units along the far wall, a syringe in hand.

“Antibiotics.” She waits for Phil to get his jacket off and roll up his sleeve, then cleans his bicep with an alcohol swab and injects the medicine. Fury continues to talk while she presses cotton over the site and snicks a bandaid over it.

“Headquarters in New York City is compromised. They hit it right after they hit the tower, more to scatter us at first, I think, but then they started coming after individuals.”

“Out in the open,” Hill mutters, “targeting with those fucking droids Hammer sold off three years ago. We weren’t quite the sitting ducks they thought we’d be, but…”

“Have you heard from anyone else?” Phil inquires, and Fury shakes his head.

“Went silent until we figured out how they were targeting us, and then there was a damned good reason not to use the phones at all.” 

“Until we know exactly how everyone was found, we’re avoiding the main SHIELD servers,” Melinda says, clicking away on her keyboard. “This is one of the satellite servers. It remains unconnected to the hive precisely for situations like this, but its capabilities are limited, and it means we can’t actually get into the main hub without drawing attention.”

“I have to get back up,” Hill says. “I’m on watch.” She pats Phil’s forearm once, squeezes, and heads back up the stairs, un-holstering her gun as she goes.

Clint watches her until she disappears, then turns to Fury. “Has Stark made contact?”

Fury raises an eyebrow. “No. For a while we were tracking his cell through a back door protocol he set up via his AI. Last known position was in Philadelphia, where he made a call and was attacked again, and since then, he’s fallen off the radar. Romanoff’s completely in the wind.”

“She’ll stay there,” Clint says. “She tossed her chip. They’re using the main lines to track us all, though god knows how they got in. Mine’s already compromised, but Romanoff called me yesterday before they got a fix. She was uninjured at the time, and might have a contact in Japan who can help. There wasn’t time to find out anything else.”

“What about Dr. Banner?” Phil says. His face is regaining its color slowly now that he’s sitting down.

“We had a communiqué from Sue Storm this morning.”

“Sue Storm?” Clint interjects, and Fury nods.

“She and Dr. Richards were at the conference in San Francisco, separated in the attack. She concealed Dr. Banner from their attackers after he changed back, and… discouraged followers pretty thoroughly, shall we say? They’re together at least, though we don’t know much else at the moment. There’s been a lot of chatter from officials in Norway—”

“What happened in Norway?” Clint glances at Phil, but Phil looks just as puzzled. Clint thinks he knows, though, a horrible churning in his gut. There’s only one reason for an attack in Norway by someone targeting Avengers.

“Someone blew the observatory at Vardo,” Melinda answers. She pulls up a window showing aerial photos of the destruction: a blackened crater where the elegant new telescope tower had been. The entire complex is gone around it, the buildings in pieces. Clint feels Phil’s fingers dig into his wrist, and opens his mouth, but Melinda points at the screen, magnifying the image. “A little too late, if you want my professional opinion.”

There, just visible under the debris and ash, intricate swirls have etched themselves into the rock. Clint breathes out slowly and feels Phil do the same. 

“Anyone see the bridge?” Phil asks.

“The observatory’s fairly remote and none of the NASA satellites were over the area at the time. Ours, however, were.” Fury taps a key, revealing a series of shots filled with light too blinding to be caused by any mere explosion. “That? I’ve damn well seen before.”

“Thank god for small favors,” Clint mutters. He’ll take it, gladly, until he hears otherwise. Jane and Thor’s brood are safer than all of them on Asgard. It’s where they should all probably go, in fact, if they get the chance.

“We’re outgunned,” Phil states, shifting in his chair. He rubs at his bad shoulder and Clint tangles their fingers briefly. “They’ve proven that, whoever they all are. So far, we can confirm AIM and Department X.” 

“HYDRA was at HQ,” Fury says, “What attacked the tower, though... I suspect that was the Corporation, using drastically enhanced Hammer artillery.”

“Shit,” Clint hisses. Phil’s eyes narrow. 

“Then we have to pull them in,” he states. “The team, everyone we can find. We’re stronger together, and they know that. That’s why they separated us.”

Fury’s eyebrow is high, but it’s more amusement, strangely, than disagreement, and Melinda turns around fully in her seat. 

“It just so happens, I have a jet. But.” She leans forward, holding up a finger. “I’m not taking my toy out until we’re actually going to use it.”

Fury crosses his arms. “Until we know where everyone is, _if_ everyone still is, we can’t make a move.”

Phil sinks back slowly, and the room goes silent. But this time Melinda is waiting, everyone looking at each other as the computers hum. Clint knows what they’re all thinking: the first thing they need is a system of communication that isn’t going to dump them back in the enemy’s lap, and that means they need to find a very specific Avenger.

Suddenly something pings in the quiet room, three gentle chimes. Phil inches his phone out of his pocket, wincing, and studies the screen for a long, heavy moment. For the first time since Clint startled awake yesterday morning, relief sags, clear and compelling, at Phil’s features. When at last he catches Clint’s eye, he holds it, smiling faintly.

“And now I know where we can start.”

~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clint gets a long chapter because he only gets one. Alas. ^_^


	4. Tony (II)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic is fully drafted, yos. ^_^

_Tony_

........................

The house is on a narrow street. The door from the back porch unlocks for Tony on the first try, which is a miracle, because he barely remembers keying his code in. He’s glad of the lack of streetlights to gleam off the suit. This one’s joints are a lot quieter than any of the others before it, and he’s been able to move fairly stealthily through the empty backyards until he reached the one he wanted. The house itself is dark and silent, the timed lighting having gone off for the night. He gets them inside and uses the last of the suit’s power to scan the place, a gauntlet extended in front of him, feeding information into a blurry but functional electronic readout. When the image fades away and the HUD finally dies, he reaches out and flicks the light switch on the wall.

He doesn’t pack the suit up through Extremis, only dipping in long enough to make the plating retract around Sarah. Just loosening the rest of it enough to extricate himself is mentally exhausting. He drops the helmet, the gauntlets, piece after piece onto the rug in the living room. Sarah snuffles steadily, not hiding her tears, but when he pulls the chest plate away, she begins to cry in earnest. Tony looks down and sees the large patch of blood on his shirt.

He’s on his knees in half a breath, yanking the t-shirt over his head and gripping her shoulders. “Baby, baby, it’s okay, it’s fine. Sarah.”

She’s got her hands cupped over her mouth and chin, and he gently eases them down. “Sarah? Hey. Honey, look at me, I’m okay. I’m not hurt.”

She shakes her head and he twists, raises his arm, smoothes his other hand down the unmarked skin over his ribs. He catches her eye. “See?”

She touches him, just the tip of her pointer finger at the fleshy part of his side. He holds still, letting her look, and thanks every god in existence for Extremis, because there’s nothing there to see anymore. Just old, flaking blood. It’s so quiet he can hear her breaths counterpoint to his own.

The next thing he knows, his arms are full. Tony exhales and hugs her close. Has to be careful not to squeeze too hard. 

“I threw up again,” she says into his shoulder. Tony nods, kissing the side of her face.

“I know. We’ll get you cleaned up.”

The second his code opened the door, the underlying systems would have turned on, superheating the water in the boiler and feeding power in through a generator. The house’s bathtub is dusty but otherwise in good shape. Tony rinses it out and starts filling it with warm water. But she doesn’t stop sobbing this time and, oh, Tony knows what’s coming, he knows.

“Is Daddy alright?”

He promised himself ages ago that he wouldn’t lie to her. Like his own father had lied to him, again and again, made excuses. But he has never tasted the urge so headily before, never been so close to just telling her what she needs to hear.

But. He will break, even more so than he would anyway, if later this turns out to be a lie.

He shakes his hand out over the tub and kneels down in front of her again on the bathroom rug. “You know your daddy’s the strongest person on earth, right?”

“Besides Thor.”

Tony nods. Swallows, and thinks about his words. “Yeah. But Thor’s not always on earth, right? And your daddy... he’s strong in other ways, stronger than anyone I’ve ever met. Ever. You know that he will do everything he possibly can to get back here to you and me.”

He’s evaded. He knows it. And for a long second, she looks him in the eye and he’s sure she’s going to call him on it. But then—

“What if he doesn’t know where we are?”

Tony bumps her chin up very lightly with his knuckles. “He knows. Trust me, he knows.”

Steve knows the whereabouts of this place better than he knows anything else, Tony is damned sure. If he’s at all physically able, he’ll get here.

Tony helps Sarah out of her pajamas, and she stands there with a towel draped around her head and shoulders until he gives the water a final swirl and turns it off. She wobbles getting in and sits down with a shiver, and doesn’t tell him to leave like she has every other time since she turned six. Tony finds a washcloth and cleans her back and front gently, then her throat, her face, her legs and arms. She dips herself under when he asks her to, and he scrubs bubbles into her hair from the bar of soap because there’s not much else. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do, and at least she won’t smell the bile anymore. It’s even the same brand of bar soap they have at home, so there’s that.

When she’s clean, her skin flushed from the hot water, he gets her out and wraps her up, one towel for her head and another for the rest of her, then goes searching for the stash of clothing that’s only been here forever and a day. He finds a black shirt displaying a befuddled cartoon pony, its mouth full of violets and the words ‘Purple Hays?’ across the top. Coupled with an old sweatshirt of Steve’s that’s way too big for her, she looks comfortable and so very young, and Tony drags her back into his arms in order to cross the distance to the living room, turning off lights with his elbows as he goes. Her head is already settled on his shoulder when they reach the couch, and she’s gone very quiet, her thumb firmly in her mouth for the first time in two years.

“Kay, peaches.” He sets her down on the couch and goes to his knees beside it, gathering up the blanket that’s folded neatly across the back and spreading it over her. She crawls a little ways up and lies down with her head on one of the throw pillows. “You hungry?”

She shakes her head.

“Think you might want to sleep a little?”

This time she doesn’t respond, but Tony can see the exhaustion in her eyes and knows it’s only a matter of time.

“Okay,” he murmurs, and tucks the blanket in close. She huddles, pulling her knees up to her chest.

“Stay here,” she says, almost a whisper, and Tony catches the hand that grips onto his wrist, turns it over and folds it in his own.

“You bet.”

Her thumb finds its way back into her mouth and she shuts her eyes.

He waits until her breathing is nasal and shallow, then gets up, walks through the doorway into the kitchen and collapses onto the floor in a sniffling, messy heap. He scoots until the wall is at his back, pulls his knees up, and muffles the force of his sobs with a hand clenched between his teeth.

Oh god. Oh god, oh god, his baby’s father might be dead. He might have to look her in the face and—Tony’s body jumps, tries to get away from the idea, and he sucks in again, curling tighter, clenching each arm with the opposite hand until it hurts. 

Six AIM soldiers. Probably more. With weapons.

He _knows_ he did the right thing. The only thing. It’s an agreement seven years old, the only decision they have never once fought over. Sarah comes first, always first. Spouses are secondary.

“Be alive, be alive, be alive,” hissed into the tops of his thighs with tears and snot and the whole nine yards. He can’t even tell the words apart, but he can feel every inch of them like shards of light piercing into his eyes.

His fingers find his ring again.

**

It’s not long before being in his own head is unbearable. When he gets to his feet, Sarah’s still fast asleep and the house is quiet. He hasn’t set foot within these walls in years, but he remembers where every room is, and is profoundly glad to find that they still contain the things they did then, and more.

If Tony Stark has to be off the grid, then he’ll damn well build a new grid.

There isn’t much. Steve put his foot down right from the start and thus, aside from the tech reinforcing the building’s walls, nothing too massive has been altered. There is no lab, no main power source capable of dealing with Tony’s crazier activities. It’s a two-bedroom with a refurbished kitchen and one and a half bathrooms. No upstairs, a passable basement. A tidy living room and an attic crawl space, from which Tony pulls down some pretty impressive MREs packed in styrofoam peanuts, and thanks god (again) for Phil Coulson.

It’s a comfortable place, perfectly sized for a couple with a young boy to bring up, though there isn’t much of James Buchanan Barnes or his parents here anymore.

There is a radio. Two different computers that are pretty damn new, considering. A set of tools and a large box of fuses, chips, all the little things that enable electronic devices to work their magic.

It’ll take him a while, but Tony can work with this.

In fact, he’s counting on it taking some time. Taking up space in his brain, too, because the silence without Sarah’s voice is too hard to keep out, and he’s sure as hell not waking his baby girl up so she can keep him company. Her oblivion from her own thoughts, however brief it proves to be, is far more important than his comfort.

He sits on the other side of the living room from the couch, pulls the radio, a clock, the innards of the kitchen television, and a pair of pliers into his lap, then dips back into the headache. 

He can feel the suit recharging on the far end of the couch, but it’s slow, and minimal. Nowhere near what they’d need to fight their way out. _JARVIS, dampen all extraneous noise emissions. Monitor as wide a perimeter as you can._

_Accounting for this adjustment, and with the current power source in the Mark X-10, my abilities are limited to the building’s physical perimeter._

_As long as you’re covering the doors and windows, J._

_Shall I activate final protocols?_

Yes, he absolutely should batten down the house. Sarah’s inside it, for god’s sake. 

But once that system comes crashing down, no one’s getting out, or in, without a serious rewiring. Tony shuts his eyes. _Not yet._

God. Not yet. He can’t.

_Acknowledged, sir._

Tony nods and pulls back out, releasing a small grunt as the headache flares, then fades. He shunts his misgivings to the side and starts dismantling the radio, one eye on the couch.

**

Sarah wakes with a gasp, all four limbs flailing under the blanket. Tony drops the tweezers and leans forward, a breath away from jumping to his feet. 

“Sarah? I’m over here.”

There’s a long, shivery moment where she seeks him out, and then the world ticks into motion again. She blinks at him from the couch, then rubs her eyes. Her face scrunches into a frustrated grimace that Tony has seen countless times after too short a nap.

It burns, seeing it here now.

He wonders if she’ll ask what he’s doing. Hopes she will. But she says nothing, just watches him with her mouth in a disturbingly stiff line. He sets the cannibalized tech down, gets to his knees and crawls over to the couch. It takes a second to situate himself with his head on his forearms, nose inches from hers. “Dreams?”

She doesn’t nod or shake her head. Her eyes move over his face aimlessly and his lungs tighten. He leans in and nuzzles his nose gently against her forehead, slow repeated swipes like a cat. Eventually he rests his cheek there. Hears her give a soft sigh.

“Ready to eat?”

That gets a response: she nods and her arms snake around his neck, locking tight. He gathers her up, blanket and all, and stands, then walks her into the kitchen. It’s tricky getting the MREs ready with one hand, but he thinks they’re in agreement about the likelihood of putting her down.

The floor is chilly under the soles of his feet, and the kitchen is way too silent, only their disjointed breathing and the crinkle of different packaging as he cracks and shakes the heating element and unwraps utensils. 

“You okay with fettuccini alfredo?” he says, because he has to bust the wall that’s forming.

She nods. He’s not sure she knows what fettuccini alfredo is. He kisses her forehead, hands her the plasticware, and moves their food to the table. 

There are plenty of chairs, but he holds her in his lap while they eat.

**

They play a card game or two. Tony drags himself away from his daughter for a grand total of four minutes to get in the shower—door open, talking to Sarah where she sits in the hallway the whole time—and scrub his skin relatively clean. And then she goes to sleep again.

He knows it’s a bad sign, he knows it. But he can’t summon that particular concern: he also knows her brain needs it, if not for the actual rest, then for whatever relative silence sleep can provide. It’s too soon for the nightmares to really start taking shape, and he’d rather she sleep than see the span of video that she caught over and over again behind her eyes.

His head has descended into a strange hollowness, the pit that forms right at the base of his skull after he’s been stretching Extremis in unorthodox ways. It’s not pain, not anymore. It’s worse, a pressure that reminds him of the omnipresent ache, that feels right on the lip of calling it back. It’ll last up to a day, he knows for sure. Beyond that? Hell, he’s never had to do what he just did to get them both out of danger, and he’s certainly never tried to restart his circuitry with nothing but sheer will. He’s still not sure how he did it. Ages ago—seven years, to be exact—he would have plunged right back in, shoved and jerked and pissed the technology off until it gave him the scars he needed to remember it, remember how to use it. Know it like he knows his own breath and blood. Master it again and again until it became second nature and the cost to get there was just a flicker of memory.

He’d never have _imagined_ his priorities could make so abrupt an about-face. Now… Now he can’t imagine it being any different.

Another thing he and Steve rarely fight over, because Tony’s rarely put up an actual fight.

He works for hours, sitting there with his back against the couch near Sarah’s feet, the thin carpet keeping him from getting too comfortable. He works through the day and on into dusk, and Sarah sleeps on. She moves, thank god, she rolls and wiggles and rises and subsides in the arcs and troughs of REM sleep. But she doesn’t wake up. It’s like her mind is desperate to keep her in the dark where things are safe. 

By the time he’s getting close to something that might be termed a communications device in the foreseeable future, he barely knows what he’s doing anymore. His fingers are slow and awkward over the circuitry, his mind wheeling around the same curve of thought like a record stuck in a groove. He can feel what’s waiting on the edges for the instant he lets go of the mechanics, and he refuses, he refuses to go there. 

No, he’ll stay awake. He’ll watch over her, he needs to watch over her. He needs to contact the others. He needs to get this working, and he needs to be here when she wakes, and he needs. He needs.

His head droops, and he shuts his eyes. Just for a minute.

~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Okay, so Tony gets a long chapter, too. Another one. I have no explanation for this strange double standard.  >.>


	5. Natasha (II)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because HER ROYAL SPYNESS! OBVIOUSLY!!! *flails*
> 
> I have no words, Natasha. You beat them into unconsciousness with your Awesome. I hope to do you justice.

_Natasha_

.......................

She stumbles, and her knee twists so hard she can’t keep silent. It’s all she can do to catch herself on her hands against the pavement, and she pushes upright again, only to have the joint fail her completely and sent her hard onto her side in the street.

“Fuckfuckfuck.” She grabs at her knee, closes both hands around it, rolling back and forth in a stupor. But there’s nothing to stop the agony. She bites her lip and rocks, waiting for the fire to subside on its own.

It’s nearly dawn, the sky seeping violet. She’s out of ammunition. All she has left are her knives, but then she’d have to let them get close, and they’re already too close to each other to make that kind of defense feasible. And as far as she can tell, they’re still armed to the teeth.

One of them she left dead in the gutter, his neck broken; another, twitching in an alley with a dislocated hip and a shattered hyoid bone. She had to shoot the next, which drew the rest down on her until she was forced to run again. And now she’ll be damned if she runs anymore, partly because her knee won’t hold her up, and partly because she’s reached the ocean. There’s nowhere left to go.

Permanent damage. She wouldn’t be surprised. Not that it will matter when they finally catch up with her. There are only three left, but three is more than enough, even if two are injured. She can’t even tell if the bargain she struck was worth it—the cell she stole is long gone, the number she dialed from memory. It might not even work; she’s a little bit out in the cold in this regard, and that was her fucking choice, wasn’t it? But that number was all she had left and it was an outside line, and she’d thought maybe…

They’d zeroed in on her seconds after she called, and gave chase. That was two hours ago. If her message was even received, help should have arrived. Unless that help is under attack, too.

She’s not one to apologize for decisions that felt necessary at the time they were made. That way lies madness. But she would have liked… She doesn’t even know. To say _something._

“There,” someone calls out, a Balkan dialect. The surge of adrenaline forces Natasha to her feet in spite of her knee, and she makes it as far as the next lamp post, wrapping an arm around it and hanging on for all she’s got, letting both legs sag for their benefit. She palms her knife and inches around to face her attackers.

They approach slowly, cradling their guns. One of them is limping badly, a dark, wet stain down his right leg. By the pallor of his skin, he’s not long for this world, despite that tourniquet he has tied around his thigh. But she knows this training. Or should she call it brainwashing? They’ll never stop until their mission is fulfilled. It’s a matter of honor.

Just as she’d hoped, the first one gets a hair too close and Natasha lunges on her good leg, snapping the blade across the tendons in his dominant wrist, right through the nylon of his sleeve. He shouts and his fingers release, the weapon clacking to the pavement. Won’t be gripping any more guns with that hand again, and she grabs the weapon up herself, but now her weakness is clear: she can’t hide her real limp, has to shuffle her way back to the pole and drag herself upright again. 

They’ll just shoot her now, won’t even bother trying to take her out in hand to hand. She tries to think about what might be left in her arsenal, but nothing comes to mind that they haven’t already felt the sting of.

One of them eyes her and murmurs something to the other, who grins, quick and humorless. Natasha checks the gun in her hand. Two rounds. She wants to scream obscenities into the sky because this should not have killed her, not when aliens and gods and mutants haven’t been able to do it. She has information, gems she wrestled out of the assassin in the alley: who is behind this, how it was organized, how beautifully simple it would still be to screw it all to hell if the Avengers could just find each other again. 

But more than all of that, she shouldn’t be alone, dying at the hands of the organization she rid herself of years ago, with the people she cares most about so fucking far away.

It’s hard to see properly. There’s blood in her eye and her depth perception is off. But she lifts the gun anyway, aims, and they aim right back. She sights intently down the barrel. One, then the other. One, then the other. Which one first?

A sound like a jet engine shears overhead, and at first she pays it no mind. Haneda Airport’s close enough that she can see the lights on the landing strips. But then the sound circles back, far too quick of a turn for any plane. Natasha looks up, and the pavement in front of her explodes.

She slips down the pole, covering her head as rocks and dirt rain down on her. Another blast goes off, four gunshots in quick succession, and then the engine sweeps close enough that she can feel heat razing her skin, and her immediate vicinity detonates one last time. 

The engine arcs away. Natasha opens her eyes.

They’re stretched on their backs, the fronts of their jumpsuits smoking. Natasha coughs and hauls herself to her feet, fingering the trigger, but not one of the three assassins moves. She can see the open, staring eyes of the nearest, the one whose wrist she cut. She hobbles forward, peering into the sky, but there’s still enough smoke to obscure her view. Weapons, she needs weapons. She finds two more handguns on the body closest to her and packs one into the strap on her thigh, and then that engine veers back with a flare of light, and she jerks the other two guns up, pointing straight ahead at whatever’s approaching.

It’s a suit of armor, the silvers and blues shining in repulsor-light as it sets down twenty yards in front of her. The cold, expressionless mask surveys all three assassins before those glowing eyes fix on her.

“You know,” says its owner, his voice made metallic, the armor’s boots clunking slowly over the ground toward her, “next time you want to get away from me, you don’t need to go to East Asia.”

Natasha lets out a breath. The helmet rolls back, and Brigadier General James Rhodes stares out at her with his eyebrows raised.

“Don’t know what I was thinking,” she says, and he lets out an airy snort.

“I do.” Rhodes bends and relieves the first assassin of all weapons, breaking the barrels of the guns with swift twists of his gauntleted hands, and snapping the blades off the knives he finds. He does the same with the second assassin, and then stops before her. Eyes her for a moment, taking in all the grime and blood. “Was what happened really that distasteful?”

It _wasn’t._ At all. She can remember every ardent second of it. Natasha licks her lips and holds there, mouth open, on the verge of words. In the end, she sighs. “Not the word I’d use.”

“Hm.” Rhodes—it _is_ Rhodes, it’s always been Rhodes; even that night, it was Rhodes, except when it wasn’t, when even _she_ couldn’t force that any longer—Rhodes lifts his head and looks skyward, mouth pursed in a thoughtful moue. “Not the word I’d use either.”

She gestures with the gun and then stares at it, ridiculous in her hand. “I’m not good at this.” She’s never been good at this. She’s good at _that,_ at what they did, but she didn’t plan, she dropped her guard somewhere in the middle, on a bed in the dark, trembling and winded, and after they were done, she found she’d been hit squarely in a place she’d forgotten about. Hadn’t even thought existed anymore. 

Her knee hurts like hell.

“I don’t think you have to be good at it,” he says, reasonable. Normal. “Just willing to take a chance.”

He taps his earbud, and finally his lips quirk upward. Natasha sways on her good leg and slings her little knife onto the pavement a ways away. At her back, the water laps gently against the shore.

“Sorry I’m late. Things got a little hairy there for a minute.” His gaze is soft, almost tender. “What do you say we get out of here?”

He extends a hand, palm up. Natasha smiles wearily and reaches out to take it. 

~tbc~


	6. Steve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look who we're finally hearing from! Yaaaaaaay!

_Steve_

........................

Steve’s broken ankle saves his life. Twice.

The first thing they do is hammer his right foot, just above the joint on the side. The agony actually clears his head in time to deflect the next blow: a fist to the throat. After that, it’s all bodies, battering into him regardless of the gasps and shouts around them, the broad daylight. Steve counts six assailants, ferociously strong, and it’s not until he breaks the clavicle of one of the women that he sees the flare in her eyes and knows exactly what he’s up against.

They’re relatively cautious with him despite their numbers, but he knows it’s only a matter of time, on one stable foot with no shield and no gun. The hit he takes to his ribcage doesn’t help, and then one of them gets hold of his wrist and twists, and Steve is abruptly fighting for his life.

He incapacitates one of the men, then goes down hard under a strike from above. Drags himself upright. Sees the flash of sunlight off metal, and grabs for the soldier nearest him. The gun goes off at the same instant his ankle finally gives out, and Steve stumbles sideways, feels the thud of the bullets slamming into the body beside his instead of into him. The gun fires again, again, a second gun, and suddenly there’s screaming everywhere, more weapons-fire. Steve heaves the body off of him—healing, the man is already _healing,_ the street is now filled with smoke and running people, something orange flares to his left, and Steve lowers his shoulder and bowls the soldier over, skidding them both along the pavement in a heap of limbs. The man’s flesh burns Steve’s skin and he jerks away, rolls under running feet until he hits the curb, and that’s when he hears a much heavier _boom,_ like a bomb going off overhead.

By the time he gets to his feet, the tower, just visible over the line of buildings, is smoking.

Something slices red-hot through his calf, and he’s hit from behind, goes down face first with a seething, snarling inferno on top of him. Hands wind into his hair and wrench his head up. The broken tower shears like a star behind his eyes, a whole floor of windows billowing gray. Rage so thick he can’t breathe stabs through Steve. He twists hard and slings the soldier atop him onto the asphalt, then grabs onto those wrists and hauls until a face is in view. Steve brings his fist back and breaks the man’s nose, then keeps hitting until the soldier sags loose beneath him. He drops his attacker and immediately begins shaking. He can’t stop.

He gains his feet anyway, because there’s no other choice, and comes face to face with the barrel of a Beretta. Steve lunges to the side, lurid pain as his ankle gives again, taking him well out of range. The shot goes off; someone cries out behind him. Steve sweeps the legs out from under the soldier and the gun skids across the pavement, swallowed up in the smoke. He turns, gets to the sidewalk as fast as he can, where a man is gasping, bleeding from a bullet to the side, the bullet meant for Steve, but before he can pull him to safety, he has to dive again to avoid more bullets. 

A single thought, incisive through all the rest: He has to get out of here, or people will be killed.

Steve staggers upright, ignores the fire stabbing up his calf, and runs.

**

He tosses his cell in a storm drain on Park Avenue. They already found him once, and if they’re still tracking him, the phone is the most obvious method. He skirts into the next alley, one without a dead end, and collapses behind a dumpster, working hard to get air into his lungs. Overhead, smoke wafts by like greasy clouds, and two blocks over, he can still hear the commotion.

Further. He has to get further away. But now that he’s down, he’s having trouble getting up again. His side aches like the deepest of bruises, his calf is bleeding, and he doesn’t even want to look at the mess that is his left wrist. He can feel it plenty. 

All he can see is Tony’s smirk as the elevator doors closed between them, Sarah still folded over his shoulder with one slipper off.

Steve pulls his socks off and rips a section out of his shirt, then binds his leg as tightly as he can, both to staunch the blood and to support the ankle. He slumps back and drags a hand over his face. There’s a blackness creeping around the edges of his vision. Lack of oxygen. He can’t remember being hit in the sternum, but that’s what this feels like, a clubbing as close to his lungs as it’s possible to get. 

Sirens whine, the sound bouncing off buildings, and he knows he can’t stay here, he knows it. He has to ditch his very recognizable leather jacket, has to get as far away from his abandoned cell phone as possible. But every flash of Tony’s face and every echo of Sarah’s giggle makes it harder to breathe.

 _“Stop,”_ Steve hisses through his teeth. He wipes his mouth. He needs time, without moving, so his body can heal. He shuts his eyes, digs his fingernails into his palm as hard as he can, and concentrates on staying awake.

Overhead, the tower pumps smoke in a never-ending cloud.

**

When it’s dark, he makes his way there.

His side hurts like a bitch. His wrist has swollen up and he’s glad of the hood on the sweatshirt he lifted from someone’s porch railing, because his face is a mess and more of his shirt has been sacrificed for bandages. Feigning a steady stride is difficult with the bullet wound through his calf and the bad ankle, but those are already healing up, he can feel it. 

The super hearing has never been more welcome, or more dreaded. Steve listens, his jaw clenched so hard it aches up in his temples. The tower is in pieces, the entire top half shattered across the street in ragged slabs. Glass, metal, a large-screen television broken over a fallen traffic signal. One of the sinks from Bruce’s lab, part of a shattered bed frame, the ripped remains of the curtains Natasha ordered two years ago from Finland. One of the older suits, a silver one, twisted unnaturally atop a crushed car and looking human enough to catch the eye again and again. 

And bodies.

He makes himself listen because it will still be true whether he can stand it or not.

Tony has systems in place, backups and defenses and at least four functional sets of armor at any one time. He would have taken her to the lab level, the most defensible area of the entire tower. The next thing he would have done is get her out.

But Steve knows about San Francisco. Before night fell, he could see the smoke across the river from Jersey, and when the shop televisions were on, blaring through storefront windows, it was Tokyo, Japan. It’s too late to misunderstand what it all means, and if they could get to Bruce, to Natasha and Clint and Coulson, to him in the middle of a street full of civilians, then the remains of the tower become ten times worse.

He stays in the shadows, and he listens as emergency personnel tally the dead.

It’s easy enough to make leaning against the wall look natural, even though it’s more that his body has decided it’s had enough for now. Steve pulls the hood low and sticks his hands into the sweatshirt’s front pocket. From there, he can hear the nearest pair, a police officer and a paramedic. They’re talking low enough to keep their conversation unintelligible to everyone else, but Steve can hear them just fine. 

So far, there’s no obvious sign of Tony or Sarah. But they’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble.

It’s torturous, the notion that at any second, they could turn over a slab and—Steve rubs his face and just shakes for a long, horrible moment. If an AIM soldier spotted him right now, Steve would be a goner before he cottoned on.

And they’re there. In the last fifteen minutes, three from the original assault have trickled in on the outskirts, plus two others, one by one, eyes not on the clean-up efforts but sifting slowly through the crowd, looking. Always looking. He can tell who they are, some heightened sense pinging off their raised body temperatures, their not-quite-natural stances. A woman from before stands at the south end of the blockade, her shoulder not healed right from when he kicked it out of its socket.

But they don’t see him. And eventually, Steve ducks down a side alley into the gloom and gets himself away from all the people before his fool’s luck changes.

**

One of them falls in behind him a block from Ground Zero. The man tails but keeps his distance, clearly unwilling to engage without the backup of his fellows. But Steve knows his time is limited: sooner rather than later, the soldier will contact the others and draw them down on Steve again, if he hasn’t already. Steve allows his limp to go more pronounced, makes copious use of the walls for support. He lets the soldier close the distance without realizing it, confidence overriding caution.

In the doorway of a condemned building on an empty street, Steve slumps against the wall, breathing hard, then snaps upright and slams the soldier headfirst into the brick when he comes around the corner to make his kill. The man’s skin flares hot under Steve’s hands and he aims a knee into the soldier’s solar plexus, hard enough to shatter ribs. The man wheezes, grapples for a hold at the juncture of Steve’s throat. All Steve has to think about is Sarah in order to hit him again across the Adam’s apple, Tony to send him to his hands and knees on the cement. The broken suit atop that car to hammer the man’s spine hard enough to render his legs useless. Maybe he’ll feel guilty about it later, but he doesn’t think so.

Steve drags the soldier up and breaks his nose with a single strike, using the heel of his hand. The man’s nostrils flood red, clogging his throat, and his tenuous hold on Steve drops away. He stares up into Steve’s face.

“Who sent you?” Steve asks, low.

“Nnn… AIM.” The man twitches and gets a hand around Steve’s wrist. But there’s no strength to it yet.

“That,” Steve hisses, stabbing a finger upward toward the hole where the tower’s lovely radiance should be, “was not AIM. Who sent you?”

The man swallows audibly. Steve sees the healing begin, a warm glow around his nose and eyes like a light shining from beneath his flesh, and breaks his nose again, to the sound of a strangled gurgle. The soldier’s mouth contorts, breaths coming ragged as he fights uselessly against Steve’s grip.

“We’re soldiers, you and me,” he splutters, eyes crossing slightly. “We fought for the same things.” 

It’s true. This man could easily be him, a lost boy just trying to put meaning back into the lack that had become his life. It’s been astonishing over the years, and frightening, just how many people have tried to become what Steve is, only to warp into something utterly different. The soldier’s body glows weakly, trying to heal itself yet again, and for a second, Steve can see the soul trapped inside these limbs, the proud veteran who just wanted to be whole once more. To make a difference.

A vision of the penthouse torn apart washes it away. “No,” Steve grunts, right into the man’s ear. “Not you. Not anymore.” 

He knocks the soldier out with a blow to the base of his skull.

**

It’s not really a struggle: Steve sees the car and decides he’s going to take it.

It’s a compact Honda with dull gray paint, sitting in the line of cars that edges the park-and-ride lot. It’s toward the back in long-term, which means its owner will be lodging in the city overnight. It’s not readily visible from the street, sandwiched between two larger vehicles, and it’s an older model without frills.

Steve walks a circuit that passes the car from two different angles, bloodied hands in his pockets and forcing his limp into submission. NY plates, no visible alarm system or GPS. Automatic locks, but probably key-triggered instead of linked to a remote fob, and the windows are likely hand-cranked.

He turns away, walks the length of the cement barrier between lot and tracks until he finds a coat hanger on the ground near a dumpster, and untwists it as he heads back. He slices the side of his hand with one end and winces, but it clots quickly.

It only takes a moment to jimmy the driver’s side lock, and the sound of an arriving train masks any noise he makes. Steve sets the hanger aside and opens the door, crouching down to get under the steering column. It’s not exactly like the cars he’s taken apart and put back together in the tower garage, but Tony’s taught him well in all things modern and mechanical, and Steve’s just stripping the second of the wires with the sharp end of the hanger when the clack of heels erupts on pavement, _very_ close.

The sound echoes strangely off the barrier. Must have stepped off the gravel track into the lot. Steve barely has time to hunch low before a woman comes into view, pencil skirt and white blouse, tapping at her phone in one hand, digging in her purse with the other. At first Steve thinks she’ll go on by, but then she looks up, right at him. 

Her mouth opens, the hand over her purse clutching around her keychain, and the whole damn world freezes.

He can see the instant she recognizes him, the disbelief in her face, followed immediately by a flash of uncertainty. Her eyes skitter from coat hanger to car, the open door, Steve’s position, and her mouth works again. She takes a step back.

“Miss?”

Steve whips his head around just as she does. She scrambles to hold onto her keys, pulling her purse close to her chest, and this time she backs toward him before something in her remembers, and she stops, caught between two unknowns.

“Miss, I didn’t mean to startle you.” A man. “Perhaps you can help me?”

“I—” She takes a visible breath, turns to tuck her purse into place under her arm, and… and looks at Steve under the curtain of curly black hair. Just a dart, but a wide-eyed one. Her eyes flick to the side and down, and he sees her swallow. It all happens in a second, and then she looks up again, smiling thinly. “I don’t have any change.” 

He has to see. He gets down on his stomach and peers under the car just in time to watch a set of black combat boots scrape to a stop on the other side of the vehicle. Above them, the ripped hem of a pant leg.

Soldier. Steve tenses up into a crouch again, leans forward on the balls of his feet. He wonders which one is the woman’s car, and if she has enough time to get to it if she runs.

“I don’t want change, miss,” the man says. His boots scrape again, the woman backs up, and he stops. “I just, I’m looking for someone. He would have come through here a minute ago.”

The woman’s hand tightens on her purse, and Steve’s throat closes up. He’s the one breaking into a car, and she’s startled, badly. She could just wash her hands of this, point him out and take herself out of the way.

“It’s not safe for you to be out here alone,” the man says, soothing. “He’s dangerous. I just need to know if you’ve seen him.”

“I… What does he look like?” She’s fiddling with her keys, turning them over and over with her fingers.

“Over six feet, blond hair. Strong guy. He’d be in bad shape, he escaped police custody today.”

“Are you alright?” she asks instead of answering, and Steve frowns. “Just, you look like… you’re in bad shape yourself.”

“Miss,” the man says, an unsettling lilt to his voice. “He could be in this parking lot right now. I’d feel better if I could walk you to your car.”

She looks over, directly at Steve again, and his heart jams up in his throat, but then she’s pointing, key in hand. “No, that’s, that’s my car. Right there.”

Steve stares at her, and she stares back. Something firms in her jaw.

“Blond?” she says, swiveling her back around to face the soldier. Steve still can’t see him. “Uh, jeans and a green sweatshirt?” 

“You’ve seen him?”

“Yeah,” she says. Steve can barely breathe. But then— “Well, I think. I saw a guy get on the train when I got off.”

A moment of silence. “On the train.”

“Yes. He… he was the only one at the stop. I’m sorry, I didn’t pay much attention.”

“Which direction?”

“Well, it would have been my train. The one heading out of the city.”

Another pause. Then, blessed of all blessings…

“Alright. Thank you, you’ve been a big help.”

She nods jerkily, and watches for a while as, presumably, the soldier turns around and heads around the barrier to the tracks. Already there’s another train coming in, the squeal of metal wheels shrieking closer. Only once the train has stopped, shut its doors again with the man inside, and departed does she turn, a single clack of her heel, to look at Steve.

“Thank you,” he manages. It sounds thin in the new silence.

She stands in the lot behind the Honda, peering at him. He makes no move to approach her.

“Are you alright?” she asks, finally, and it’s different from the way she asked the soldier. Quieter, concerned.

“I will be.”

She steps a little closer. “You’re all over the news.”

Steve shuts his eyes and breathes. “Ma’am, you need to get in your car and go. There’ll be more of them.”

She looks scared again, and Steve wonders what exactly the soldier looked like, to elicit such a visceral reaction from her. But still she doesn’t leave. “Do you need a ride? I could take you somewhere.”

If only there were somewhere safe. But there’s only one place he can think of, one place he absolutely needs to be. “Thank you again. But it’s better if… if you’re not with me.”

She chews her lip but doesn’t argue, and he hopes she has the self-interest enough to give up this time, to let it go and not feel any guilt over it. She’s done more than most would have, and he’s seen what AIM soldiers do to innocent bystanders once their usefulness is gone.

“Do you need a phone? Can I call someone for you?”

 _Tony._ He’s not sure what his face does, but her eyes widen and she moves closer. Steve makes himself breathe, still crouched there on the ground. He gestures her back and she halts.

“It wouldn’t be safe for you to do that,” he says, finally, and after a second, she gives a slow nod.

“Alright.”

“Thank you,” Steve says again. He’s starting to realize he’ll never be able to say it enough. He searches wearily for something he _can_ give her. “If any more of them come, don’t be a hero, just tell them… tell them you don’t know anything, and then get out of their way.”

He pulls the car door open again and gathers the loose wires up.

“He got out,” she says, and Steve turns around. She’s still standing there, keys in one hand, a woman just off of work, commuting home. She gives him a little flicker of a smile. “When the tower went down. I saw it on the news.”

Steve nods. Can’t do more for how his throat has closed up. He blinks, nods again. Gets into the car and waits until she turns for her own vehicle. Once she’s in and safely away, he starts the Honda up, backs out of the space, and drives out of there.

** 

He drives until the sun crests a watery gold on the horizon and the stretch of road teems with vehicles pushing steadily toward Columbus. In the press before the crush, where the pace shivers just shy of jamming into stop-and-go, Steve keeps a mile below the speed limit. The battle for every single inch of that mile stings. None of its barbs have blunted, even with a whole night behind the wheel, but Steve _will not_ draw attention to himself, and that barb is much sharper, much more keenly aimed.

The radio keeps up a steady chatter about the events on both coasts and in Japan. The report about Norway hits Steve hard out of left field, leaving him gripping the wheel so tightly the plastic warps. And there’s nothing he can do. 

In amongst all of that mess, a few empty warehouses burning on the outskirts of New York City make barely a blip on the radar, unless you know what to listen for. Steve swears. He keeps his eyes on the road and doesn’t think about how many friends he might have lost when SHIELD headquarters fell. 

At least he knows now that Tony did in fact make it out of the tower, all the way to Philadelphia—where he was promptly ambushed. After that, nothing. 

He thinks, just once, about switching vehicles. Leaving this one behind and taking another. Instead he fills the little car’s tank with the cash he’d taken to buy bagels, and keeps going. This car is a ping on the radar all by itself, but every other car he steals is just another flashing arrow pointing straight at him.

In the end, though, he can’t shake the discomfort. He ditches the car in Greensburg, Indiana, then sneaks inside the back of an empty U-Haul on its way up the 74. He reaches Shelbyville before noon, climbing out in a shopping plaza within walking distance of the bus depot, and spends the day flat on his back in a truck bed a mile in the opposite direction, shaded in unearthly blues by the tarp that covers it. It’s another one in the long-term section, this time of a parking garage, and there’s no one around, but Steve can’t sleep. His brain keeps spinning and spinning, back to the same two faces. The memory of their smiles only makes his chest hurt, makes him flip over fitfully onto his side before he remembers to keep from jarring the truck.

He’s never needed a map for this; he could find his destination in his sleep. Hours grinding it into his head have proven well worth the effort, but if he gets there and finds it empty, or worse... He can’t think what he’ll do. Probably drop right there onto the ground and stay until the first person finds him, and at that point, it won’t matter if it’s not SHIELD.

It would probably be better if it weren’t.

He thinks again, _Maybe. Maybe I shouldn’t go there._ But. He’s circled this fear too many times already. He’s had one eye on the road behind him the entire way, made more than a few detours to weed out anyone interesting from the crowd, watched the corners and the stoplights and the cars next to him as they rumbled on by. He’s as sure as anyone can be that he hasn’t been successfully followed. If they find the car now, they’ll have to assume the bus came next, and then Indianapolis, with a million people to hide behind and an airport if things really get tight. And if not Indianapolis, then the field of search will open so wide that any direction will be as good as the next.

And who would ever stick a safe house in Shelbyville, Indiana?

The day stretches, minutes ticking by, and heat settles uncomfortably over his skin. He shifts and turns, and at one point, shuts his eyes, because there’s nothing to see.

He sleeps then, and he dreams of Sarah.

~tbc~


	7. Sarah

_Sarah_

......................

The smoke is still thick, and in every pocket of it, Steve can hear crying, people calling out in languages he doesn’t know. His eyes sting so badly sometimes that he can’t see, but he can still feel the hand in his and hear the footsteps shuffling through the dirt behind him, and that’s enough.

He can feel the heart beating against his own through his suit, through the blanket. Through it all.

On the shoreline, yet another chopper sets down, its rotors shoving the smoke further back. At least the explosions have ceased, and now the constant roar of burning is all that lies behind him. The hand in his jerks suddenly downward and Steve stops, tensing his arm and lifting gently until his companion finds his feet again amidst the tumble of rocks.

The boy looks up with luminous eyes through the holes of Steve’s filthy cowl. It sags on his head, overly large. He can’t be more than ten. He’s one of the luckier ones: his mother is only a few feet behind them with his two siblings, and whole.

The doors of the chopper open and black-suited agents jump out, followed by those with medical bags. Gurneys spring upright, stretchers snap taut, water is rolled out alongside blankets in burgeoning bags. There are already clusters of people huddled on the ground before them, soft sobs and low murmurs. Steve leads his group to the side, out of the way of emergency triage: they’re moving under their own power and not badly injured, which is much more than most of these others. The destruction has stopped, at least, the military assault of this country’s government finally halted. He doesn’t even know the names of most of the people he fought alongside—teams from neighboring countries, loners who decided to throw in their lot on the side of the victims—but they won.

It’s very difficult to call _this_ a victory, though.

It should end, this killing of those who are different. And it hasn’t. In eighty years, the human race as a whole has learned very little, except that there are always new ways to tell oneself apart from the others. The families that lived here have been dragged apart forever. The majority of the children are orphans now, their parents having used their extraordinary gifts to buy them time to escape, but they were always outnumbered, and Steve has never been sorrier for the fact that help came too late.

These children haven’t manifested powers yet, even if they have them, and Steve knows for damn sure that half the bodies he stepped over today weren’t mutants at all. Just people, all of them, cornered and killed by a majority that fears the very insinuation of difference.

A familiar rushing sound arcs overhead, red and silver cutting through tarry smoke. Tony lands with less grace than usual and straightens slowly. There’s a woman clinging to his back with her arms around his neck, and she tumbles off, staggering away. The teenaged boy in Tony’s arms is covered in scrapes, blood, dirt, and he’s thin, thinner than any teenager should be. Tony passes him into the arms of one of Xavier’s team, a healer, then stands watching the man carry the boy away.

At last, Tony turns around, his mask shunting back to reveal a sweat-streaked face and exhausted eyes that find Steve in seconds. Tony’s shoulders visibly drop, and he makes his way across the rocks, moving carefully through the refugees. His suit is riddled with scorch marks and dents where bullets (and worse) ricocheted off during the battle. Steve releases the boy’s hand to his mother’s grip and watches the family of four sink wearily to the ground in an embrace. But there’s no one to take his final charge from him. No one left anywhere.

In the middle of the dirt and grime and smoke, Tony comes to a stop in front of Steve. Steve stares at him, can’t get his jaw to unlock. But Tony’s eyes hold nothing but resigned regret. His gaze drops to the bundle Steve cradles against his chest. So light, hardly any weight to her; it would be easy to forget she’s there. But she’s asleep, radiating heat and peace.

Tony lifts a gauntleted hand and, as carefully as stroking a rose petal, eases back the dirty blanket to reveal the baby, huffing steadily through parted lips. Thick eyelashes, wide nose, barely-there chin. Her skin is so smooth, clean even now. Tony looks down at her for a long while, and then he curls his hand around Steve’s nape and leans forward until his forehead rests against Steve’s temple. And together they stand, and breathe.  
   
~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry the penultimate chapter is so short, but the last one will be longer. Alas, the story will not be finished until after this weekend; I am headed out of town and will not be back till Monday. Hopefully this will hold you over till then! ^_^


	8. Steve (II)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two comments I just HAD to share (i.e., Made Me Laugh Hard Enough To Snort):
> 
>  
> 
> From Tsukino_Akume:  
> 
> _"Just wanted to say that I just tried chocolate chip scrambled eggs because I couldn't stop wondering what they'd actually taste like._
> 
> _... You may have forever changed the way I eat my eggs."_
> 
>  
> 
>    
> ...and from Zolac_no_Miko: 
> 
> _"I don't think I've ever actually seen Natasha/Rhodey before BUT I LOVE IT. THEY SHOULD HAVE MANY TINY FAT BABIES. TINY FAT BAMF BABIES FULL OF ASS KICKING."_  
>   
> 
> Seriously, guys. Thank you all so very much for following this story and for making my day over and over again. ♥

_Steve_

............................

It’s the longest eight hours he’s ever had to wait. By the time Steve climbs out of the truck bed and moves into the night, the Tony and Sarah in his mind have died a thousand times and the house is empty; he’s come for nothing but the final shattering of his heart.

The Barnes’ old house is on a plain street lined with trees that creak in the wind. Steve makes his way to it, circling the block once in spite of his ankle, dipping into an alleyway for a good half hour while he watches the street. It has grown cold enough that people do not linger out of doors, instead pulling cars into driveways and hurrying in toward lighted windows. There’s the appearance of a light on in the Barnes’ house as well, but Steve knows they’re on timers, set within the window frames to turn on and off with an algorithm of Tony’s design. There is no outward signal that anyone is there.

At last, the coast feels clear down to the marrow of his bones, and he hops the fence into the backyard, coming down in a crouch on the other side of the boundary line. The lemon tree in the corner has dropped most of its fruit, and the branches swing back and forth, dragging shadows across the grass. Steve moves up to the back porch, keeping low. No alarms, nothing that outwardly registers his presence. Nothing moves behind the drawn curtains over the windows.

If Tony were here, he’d have set up some sort of mechanism, something to tell him if—

Can’t think like that. Steve slips in through the weather door into the mudroom. It always acted as a porch for Bucky, or so he’d told Steve ages ago, but these days it’s bare of all things that might have personalized it. Shielding’s not down yet, or he’d never have been able to get this far. Steve hunches down painfully by the back door and activates the keypad, a panel made to resemble a capped power outlet. 

Still no alarm.

The code accepts with a soft _ting._ When Steve pushes the door open, it’s to find Tony standing in front of the couch with his arm outstretched, the bright blue-white of a single gauntlet aimed directly at Steve’s face.

Steve freezes, and Tony’s body goes utterly still, even his breath. Then Tony sags. His arm drops, as if heavier than stone, and a single sigh shakes out of him, crossing the room to Steve’s ears.

A mere moment ago, Tony was asleep, Steve can see it in the way he sways, the way he blinks, the red mark on his cheek from resting on folded arms. A Mark X suit sits on the end of the couch directly behind Tony, one arm ending abruptly at the elbow.

Tony’s mouth ticks sharply at the corner. “St—” he says, and takes a quick breath. His shoulders hitch. 

There’s a shuffling from the couch, a mound of blankets moving, and then the most beautiful sound Steve has ever—

 _“Daddy.”_ Sarah tumbles off the couch, thumping down hard onto her knees and scrambling forward. She throws herself into Steve’s arms before she’s even gained her feet, and Steve’s next breath breaks on a tortured grunt as he squeezes her to him, rocking back on his knees, nose full of her smell. He buries his face in her hair, a wild mess of curls, weaves his fingers through it. Runs his hands over her and finds nothing amiss. Grips her close again. When he can think, when he has to think, to remind himself not to crush her, he looks up, heart juddering.

In the middle of the room, Tony stares silently, dark hair and pale skin, eyes rimmed red. Steve can read everything in them, things so devastating they choke in his gullet. Tony tosses the gauntlet to the side with so listless a motion that the glove bumps the lip of the couch and thunks to the carpet.

Tony’s step drags as he approaches. When he’s close enough, Steve hauls him in around the waist, and Tony’s whole body arcs into it like a bending willow. Steve turns his face into Tony’s stomach, presses his nose to the crook of his husband’s hip and inhales, jeans and skin and metal.

For a moment, Tony’s hand settles as light as a lost bird against Steve’s head. Then his fingers clench, until he’s holding tight to Steve’s hair, shaking, curling down over Steve. He hears the rush of a sob when Tony gives in.

**

Tony shuts the house down with his code and a palm flat against the middle of the back door: steel barriers in the wall frames and emissions dampeners, bolts finally locking home. Only his or Steve’s DNA can trigger it. The hum of it all sliding home is smooth, and when it’s done, there’s a new quality to the silence.

Sarah is still in Steve’s arms, as if she’s melded straight to his front. Her grip is tense around his neck. He can feel her breathing. It’s an effort now even to get to his feet, but he manages it, staggering as his ankle burns. It’ll take time to heal yet, and now that he’s still, now that both his greatest fears have gone unrealized, his energy is rushing from him like hemorrhaging blood.

He can tell that Tony sees it, but he can’t avoid the distraction of Tony himself. Everything is in fine-point: the lines around Tony’s eyes, the way his beard has begun to grow out, the curl of his toes in the carpet as he walks. Steve can feel something swelling inside him, waiting only for the necessary energy to burst wide. 

Tony pads closer from where he’s laid the gauntlet with the rest of the suit, and settles his hand on Sarah’s back, rubbing lightly. “Are you hurt?” he asks, very softly. 

Steve has never been more conscious of Sarah’s sharp ears. He looks Tony in the eye. “I’m fine.”

And he lets Tony see the truth. But it’s not a danger; Tony understands Steve in ways no one else ever has, even Bucky. Steve can see it when Tony agrees to silence. He runs his fingers down Steve’s sleeve from bicep to elbow, following their path with his eyes. 

“Think you can eat?”

Steve’s hungry. He follows Tony to the kitchen and sates his growling stomach at the table there, Sarah still clinging to him with her head settled over his heart. But her stillness has fled: she talks steadily now, almost manically, about flying, and getting sick, and card games, about convenience store bathrooms and Papa’s old t-shirt for her pajamas. It satisfies more than just physical hunger. Steve’s eyes move continuously over Tony’s face as Sarah speaks.

Until. “What happened to you, Daddy?”

Much quieter, and cautious. Steve meets Tony’s eyes and knows that Sarah saw something. He just doesn’t know what.

“Had to run,” he murmurs, watching Tony the entire time. He rubs his cheek against Sarah’s hair. “And then I had to hide. I drove a long way to find you.”

“You did?”

“All night.”

Sarah lifts her head and peers into his face. Steve peers back, gives her a small smile. The pain, once cut with the adrenaline he needed in order to reach his goal, is now impossible to ignore, a thrum that beats slowly up through his body. He’s not sure what Sarah’s seeing in his expression. Afraid it might still be too much. But she only sighs and puts her head back down on his chest.

There are beds, pristinely made in two darkened rooms. Steve wants nothing to do with it, though, and one look at Tony’s face is enough to know that he doesn’t have to say a word. He gets up and carries Sarah with him, limping down the hall, Tony’s watchful gaze a weight upon him. But Tony lets Steve help him wrestle the bigger of the mattresses off its frame and into the living room, the most central room, while Sarah trails after. They push the couch against the wall and set up the bed in the middle of the floor.

“Hey, peaches,” Tony says, sheets and blankets under one arm. He crouches at the foot of the mattress and holds them out to Sarah. “I have to give your dad a bath, like you had. You want to make sure the bed’s ready for when he’s all clean?”

“Yes.” She gathers up the bedding and sets about with a purpose. Tony watches her for a moment, then takes Steve lightly by his good wrist, leading him down the hall to the bathroom.

“Leaving the door cracked,” he calls back, and Sarah answers, “Yep.”

Once inside, Tony starts the shower and grabs a towel from the cupboard. He slings it over an empty rack as the water drums like rain on tin into the tub. Only then does the ease dissolve into barely checked speed: Tony’s hands glance over Steve, a swift canvas of his body from shoulders to thighs. He draws Steve’s shirt up, sliding a palm over the span of still-purple flesh across his ribs. Now that Sarah is not here to notice, Steve can hear Tony’s breath coming too fast. Hands he knows so well track purposefully around his hips and knead up either side of his spine, feeling for tender spots. Tony cranes to the side to see an even more massive patch of heat, and Steve gets the torn shirt out of the way entirely, wincing at the pull of bruised muscle as he maneuvers it over his head. His ankle aches, badly. Without the serum, he’d be so much worse than this. And he should turn, get a look at the overall damage in the mirror, but so close, Tony is a beacon, sucking all his attention straight in and blinding the rest. It’s like drinking ice water when Steve had no idea how parched he really was.

The swelling of his wrist is hard to miss. Tony slows long enough to cradle it in both hands, thumbs brushing tender flesh. Steve murmurs noncommittally at the question flicked up to him in Tony’s eyes. He tilts his head, trying without conscious thought to catch Tony’s gaze, and for an instant, he finds and holds it.

Tony’s fingers move down to his belt next, unbuckling it, and there, at last Steve sees and feels the stutter, the determination to ignore it in spite of everything. The way Tony has always been, always will be.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Steve whispers, almost without realizing it. Tony’s progress halts, and Steve lifts his good hand like a man drunk, runs his thumb from Tony’s temple down the arc of his jaw, barely touching the line of his beard. “You don’t know how much I…”

It’s not right. It’ll never be right because words aren’t big enough to house this, Sarah, and everything that would have died with her. With _them,_ had Tony not kept them safe. 

He can feel Tony trembling. Tony sways forward as if blown by a gust. He skates his fingertips down Steve’s bare side, coming to rest once more at the top of his belt. Steve ducks his head again, needing desperately to look his husband in the eye—he can’t define all that he needs, but it’s oppressive as hell, and then Tony lurches into him, winds a hand through his hair, meets his mouth, more inhalation than kiss, noisy and ungainly and _raw,_ all of him there in a single embrace, and Steve’s throat blocks right up. He rocks off balance against the sink, crushes Tony to him roughly enough that Tony whimpers, and Steve is so very aware of Sarah humming on the other side of that door, the water drumming behind him in the tub, the taste of his husband’s mouth more provocative and familiar than anything, rushing back across his tongue and teeth like it had never been gone in the first place.

Somewhere he finds the wherewithal to pull back. Tony parts from him on a gasp, and their lips remain touching, sharing air, brushing with each breath. Tony’s forehead furrows like he’s in pain, and Steve cups his jaw. Lifts his chin and trails his mouth as lightly as he is able over Tony’s closed eyelids.

“Shower.” Tony sounds choked. His fingers rub Steve’s neck in a frenzied circle, as if he’s only just stopping himself from grabbing hold again. The heat bleeding through Tony’s clothing is overwhelming, and he smells… _God,_ he smells like…

There’s no way to say what Steve’s thinking beyond what he’s already said. Not something of such magnitude, not yet.

“Go shower,” Tony breathes, steadier. For the first time in what feels like years, Steve sees a smile curve at that amazing mouth. “Then sleep.”

** 

Sarah’s fingers fist against Steve’s shirt and release just as slowly, her thumb tucking up beneath a fold of cloth. She draws a hitching breath and exhales. Her eyelids flutter steadily, the dreams vibrant beneath. The living room’s corners are dark with shadow, the walls faded from sight. The only light is the couch-side lamp and its circle of gold; Tony’s eyes are rich and soft in its glow.

Sarah’s more on Steve than beside him, collapsed atop his chest where he can feel her heartbeat, and Tony’s heat is a welcome comfort against Steve’s ribs. Tony shifts even nearer, pressing Sarah more closely between them. It’s as much a sigh as an actual movement, a final release of energy. Steve threads his fingers through Tony’s hair, and strokes downward. Threads and strokes.

“I was sure they shot you.” Tony says it too quietly for normal human ears.

“In the calf, through and through. It’s healed.” Steve continues the steady movement of his hand through Tony’s hair. “Ankle’s broken.”

“I noticed.” Tony is silent for a moment. “How long do you need?”

“Be fine by tomorrow night.” Steve rubs his thumb just behind Tony’s ear. “You?” 

“Day or two,” Tony murmurs, and Steve’s fingers pause.

“Enough here to work with?”

Tony shrugs one shoulder. “I’m extremely resourceful.”

“That never gets less attractive.”

“Better not,” Tony huffs, and shuts his eyes. Steve can feel the tension when he stretches some lingering ache. But his hand never moves, fingers locked loosely around Sarah’s elbow. “Whatever else, the lockdown signal went through. If Phil’s there to receive it, he’ll know where to find us.”

“I love you,” Steve says, and Tony meets his eyes again. He searches Steve’s face, brow furrowed. Steve lifts Sarah’s limp fingers gently from his chest and kisses them, watching Tony the whole time. His little girl is in his arms, without so much as a scratch on her, and he can’t, he’ll _never—_ “Can’t put this into words.”

His voice breaks and for a long moment, no one moves. Then Tony lets go of Sarah’s elbow at last, sliding his arm around them both, and settles his chin on Steve’s shoulder. “Words are cheap,” he says, very softly. “Just...” He lets out a deep breath and rubs his cheek against Steve, and settles, leaving the sentence unfinished. Sarah’s hand clenches suddenly in Steve’s shirt, her whole body tensing, and Steve lifts his head, but Tony’s already stroking her back, up and down the length of her spine. She lets out a stilted whimper, but the wrinkle between her brows fades. Her mouth drops slowly open, her breathing noisy. Steve is reminded forcefully of the way she slept as a baby.

“No nightmares,” Tony says. “Not yet.”

Steve frowns and kisses the top of her head. They’ll come all too soon, and he wants to be there to send them packing as soon as is humanly possible. But. “What about you?”

At first, Tony doesn’t move, and then he shrugs again. “Haven’t slept long enough.”

Steve’s had nightmares. Waking ones. Dreams with a taste that still lingers in the back of his throat. But it’s all false: Tony’s whole, and here, and even if he was injured before, he’s not anymore. 

“I love you,” Steve whispers again, craning down to muffle it in Tony’s hair. “God, I _love_ you, do you have any idea?”

Tony meets the kiss with a fervency unanticipated, the pressure of his mouth hot against Steve’s. It shudders through Steve that he’s still not past the horror of what could have been, that something inside still shakes with the possibility of Tony being gone, forever beyond his reach. He’ll never be ready for that, it’ll blow him wide open.

Tony relaxes back with an almost soundless moan, parting their mouths and working his face up against Steve’s neck. He yawns. The sound of it is so outside of everything that’s happened. So normal. Steve’s rattled nerves ease.

He’ll deal with what happened, with this and what this means for them, later. Tonight, he’s going to sleep, and hang on to everything that is again—blessedly—within his grasp.

~fin~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! A thousand thank yous to coffeejunkii for listening to all the babbling and hypothesizing and general development of a story much bigger than would fit in any accessibly sized draft. ^_^ 
> 
> I realize this story is much larger than these 8 chapters. I have no idea if I will add on to it in any form, but if I do, rest assured, it will be posted here on AO3. Again, I appreciate you all so much for reading this fic! You have been marvelous and you've made my writing experience twice as awesome.

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